The Chalcolithic in Portugal

The Chalcolithic — literally the “Copper Age” or “Copper-Stone Age” — designates the prehistoric period of transition between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. In Portugal, it unfolds mainly throughout the third millennium BC (roughly between about 3000 and 2000 BC), at a moment when the agro-pastoral communities of the Iberian Peninsula intensify production, organise the territory into hierarchies and adopt, systematically for the first time, copper metallurgy. It is not a sharp break with the Neolithic world, but an acceleration of processes already under way: greater population density, specialisation of labour, and long-distance exchange networks linking the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean.

Fortified settlements and the organisation of the territory

The most characteristic image of the Portuguese Chalcolithic is that of the fortified settlement, set on high ground and defended by lines of walls with towers and bastions of circular plan. In the Estremadura region, the Castro do Zambujal, in Torres Vedras, is one of the largest and best-studied in the Peninsula, with several construction phases raised over more than a millennium. South of Lisbon, the settlement of Leceia, in Oeiras, preserves three lines of limestone walls built at the beginning of the third millennium, while Vila Nova de São Pedro, in Azambuja, gave its name to an entire cultural facies and became famous for the thousands of arrowheads recovered there.

In the Alentejo interior, the logic is different: instead of stone walls, one finds vast enclosures bounded by ditches dug into the bedrock, of which Perdigões, in Reguengos de Monsaraz, is the most spectacular example. These spaces combined domestic, funerary and ceremonial functions, showing that Chalcolithic monumentality was not confined to defence.

Copper metallurgy

The technical novelty that gives the period its name is the working of copper. Within the settlements there appear areas reserved for metallurgical activity, with crucibles, slag and moulds, alongside traces of spinning, weaving and dairy production. Copper objects — daggers, axes, chisels, Palmela points — are still rare and of high value, circulating as prestige goods. Their production required control of ore sources and specialised knowledge, which reinforced the social asymmetries already visible in the architecture and in the funerary assemblages.

The adoption of copper did not replace stone: flint and polished stone continued to provide everyday tools. It was above all on the symbolic and social plane that the new metal mattered, as a marker of status.

The Bell Beaker phenomenon

In the late Chalcolithic, Bell Beaker pottery spreads — bell-shaped vessels decorated with incised or impressed bands that are found across much of western Europe. The Tagus estuary is one of the regions where early maritime examples appear, dated to around the twenty-eighth century BC, which places present-day Portuguese territory among the relevant foci of this horizon. More than a homogeneous “culture”, the Bell Beaker appears to have functioned as a set of prestige objects and practices shared by elites of different regions.

The Chalcolithic legacy is not exhausted in the settlements. The same centuries saw the raising and reuse of countless monuments of megalithism — dolmens, tholoi and menhirs — and the whole of these remains constitutes one of the richest chapters of Portuguese archaeology, studied continuously since the late nineteenth century.