Heraldry for the Dead: Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia

Introduction

 The engraved stone plaques of prehistoric Iberia are mind traps. Their hypnotically repetitive designs, the eyes that stare out from some of them, and their compositional standardization have intrigued prehistorians for over a century (Figure I.1). Discovered in hundreds of Late Neolithic (3500–2000 BC) burials throughout southwest Iberia (Figure I.2), the engraved plaques have enjoyed an enduring place in the scholarly imagination. The nineteenth-century Portuguese medical doctor Augusto Filippe Simões (1878:53) wondered whether they might be “amulets or insignias or emblems or cult objects.” After the eminent Portuguese geologist Carlos Ribeiro showed Florentino Ameghino, the Argentine naturalist, some of the plaques at the Paris Exposition in 1878, Ameghino (1879:219) speculated that they represented “a complete system of ideographic writing that awaits decipherment and obscures facts of great importance.” The Portuguese prehistorian Vergílio Correia (1917:30) argued that the plaques are “what they simply are—idols or icons of prehistoric divinities.” The Polish ethnologist Eugeniusz Frankowski (1920:23) believed that the plaques were not idols or divinities but representations of the dead. To the Portuguese archaeologist Victor dos Santos Gonçalves (1999a:114), the plaques unquestionably depict the European Mother Goddess. For nearly twenty years I found the palm-sized plaques easy to ignore. Their subtly engraved lines and their dark gray color hardly called out for attention, particularly when they were displayed in dimly lit museum cases. When the occasional plaque did catch my eye I would, I confess, experience a brief flicker of curiosity. I recall one such moment in the summer of 1994 at the Museu Municipal de Montemor-o-Novo, a small provincial museum in the Alentejo region of southern Portugal. I was visiting the museum with my geologist collaborator Howard Snyder to examine the stone tools in its collection as part of our study of trade during the Late Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula. We were particularly interested in stone tools made of amphibolite, a dark greenish-black metamorphic rock found in this region of Portugal. After noticing a group of engraved plaques displayed next to some amphibolite tools in the museum, we casually remarked that the plaques and the stone tools resembled each other in color, form, and size. Howard even suggested that the plaques’ artists had represented the crystalline microstructure figur e i.1. Plaque from Olival da Pega (Évora, Portugal). Photograph by author, courtesy of Museu Nacional de Arqueologia. introduction  of amphibolite in the geometric designs of the plaques. The hot Alentejo sun and hundreds of hours spent peering down a microscope at stone tools had clearly gotten to him. Howard needed a day at the beach, and I did not see myself as an “art and symbolism” person. All this changed, however, in the winter of 2000. My colleague Jonathan Haws had kindly mailed me a new book, Reguengos de Monsaraz: Territórios megalíticos (Gonçalves 1999a), summarizing Gonçalves’ thinking about the archaeology of the Reguengos de Monsaraz region, the heartland of amphibolite and of the engraved slate plaques. The book sat unopened on my office bookshelf for a few weeks, until I had time one evening to look at it. Casually thumbing through the book, I saw familiar images—plans of megaliths, site distribution maps, and photographs of undecorated handmade Neolithic pottery. My calm was disrupted, however, when I reached the full-page color photographs of the engraved plaques. Nestled in my warm and cozy office in Ripon, Wisconsin, while arctic winds howled outside , I was stunned to see the individual incisions and delicate cross-hatchings that filled the designs. For the first time, I noticed the abrasions and scratches and the grooves in the plaques’ perforations left by their original drilling. I could see where engravers had made mistakes and where they had corrected them. I could identify plaques engraved in the same idiosyncratic style and possibly produced by figur e i.2. Region in southwest Iberia in which engraved plaques have been found. introduction  the same engraver. I saw beautiful plaques and strange plaques. And for the first time the plaques spoke to me. While 5,000 years separate us from the world of Late Neolithic Iberians, there is something palpably accessible about the engraved plaques—at least under good light. I was hooked. Ultimately I was inspired to write this book. This is a book about many things. It is above all about seeing...