Menhir-statues and decorated stelae

Under the heading of menhir-statues and decorated stelae are gathered a heterogeneous set of stone monuments that share the representation of the human figure or of its attributes. They are, in a broad sense, the first sculptures of Portuguese territory: blocks raised vertically that, over the course of several millennia — roughly between the late Neolithic and the end of the Bronze Age —, ceased to be mere markers in space and became images of people, ancestors or deities. They are distinguished from simple menhirs precisely by this figurative charge, even if the boundary between the two is frequently tenuous.

From stone to body: the meaning of the two categories

The conventional distinction is typological. The menhir-statue works the block in the round, suggesting the three-dimensionality of a body — head, trunk, sometimes arms or breasts in relief. The stela keeps an essentially flat face, on which the figure and its adornments are engraved, incised or pecked. Between the two extremes lies a whole gradation of solutions, and many researchers prefer to speak of an anthropomorphic continuum that runs through megalithism and prolongs the concerns already visible in Portuguese megalithic art, with its crooks, axes and schematic figures.

More than individual portraits, these stones seem to have functioned as presences: the image of the ancestor or the chief fixed in the landscape, guaranteeing the continuity between the living and those who came before them.

The chronology is long and uneven according to the regions. The oldest manifestations are associated with the world of Neolithic and Chalcolithic megalithism, in dialogue with dolmens and enclosures; the latest accompany the social transformations of the Bronze Age, when the assertion of warrior elites finds in stone a privileged support for propaganda.

The groups of the North and of Estremadura

In the North of Portugal — Trás-os-Montes, Alto Douro, the Minho coast — a strong polymorphism prevails. Small stelae with schematic figures coexist with T-shaped blocks bearing a nose and brow arches in relief, and with true statues of larger size, some armed with a dagger or sword, like the well-known pieces from Chaves. It is a group that well illustrates the passage from the schematic image to a more corporeal representation.

In Estremadura and the Alentejo, the panorama is more homogeneous. The diadem-stelae present the face inscribed within an oval or a quadrilateral, surrounded by lines figuring the hair and the necklaces, stylised arms reduced to a stroke with fingers and, at times, attributes such as the belt. This series, with a feminine component marked by the presence of diadems, is distributed across a territory where some of the most remarkable vertical monuments of peninsular prehistory are concentrated, from the Menir dos Almendres to the colossal Menir da Meada.

The warrior stelae of the South-Western Bronze

The most spectacular chapter opens in the Bronze Age, in the south-west of the peninsula. The so-called Alentejo stelae and, later, the stelae of the Final Bronze Age or of the Extremaduran type replace the whole human figure with a repertoire of prestige objects engraved on the stone: swords, daggers, axes, spears, circular shields and the still poorly interpreted “anchor-shaped” sign. It is in the region to the west of Beja that the greatest number of these funerary monuments in the whole peninsula is concentrated, identifying the graves of chiefs who dominated small settlements of the plains.

Some of these monoliths, especially already on the threshold of the Iron Age, incorporate inscriptions in the so-called South-Western script, as occurs on the celebrated Warrior Stela of Almodôvar — testimony that these stones continued to mark territories and memories long after the first menhir-statues were raised. Taken together, stelae and menhir-statues constitute one of the richest and most debated dossiers of Portuguese archaeology, for the way in which they articulate sculpture, ritual and power across four millennia.