Punctuated stages of megalithic construction: from barrows chronologies to sediments

Presentación de la comunicación oral del día 4 de septiembre de 2014 en la sesión "B27. "Megalithic biographies”: cycles of use and closure" of the XVII World UISPP Congress, celebrated in Burgos.
Archaeological excavations carried out in Galicia (NW of Iberia) during the last 15 years, have shown that megalithic barrows had a complex and long-standing life. Not only in terms of later uses and reuses (something that has been already acknowledged in bibliography since many years) but also in terms of construction and ‘megalithic’ use. Today, we can assume that barrows life was not so simple as: construction, use and abandonment. Rather, barrows could be easily compared, for instance, to Christian churches, that once build up were permanently used and rebuild, their ‘form’ becoming either the expression or the result of a permanent negotiation between social and materialization processes. In this contribution, we review the empirical data from different well characterized barrows, such as Romea (with recognizable phases of rebuilding or use dating to 5920 – 5660calBP, 5320 – 5030calBP and 4970 – 4790calBP) and Forno dos Mouros (with a long time-span punctuated in 6510-6300calBP and 5070-4850calBP). From these data, we propose a hypothetical sequence of specific periods of building, use and rebuilding which we relate to social processes occurring on increasingly complex and progressively more unequal communities, even with changing individual identities. This hypothesis is contrasted with a large collection of C14 dates of Galician megaliths. Based on this, we propose that the traditional assumption of a continuous monumental activity from ca. 6,500 to 4,500 cal. BP should be revised since a discontinuous series of building activity and use is a more likely explanation for the chronologies. Activity seems to have been circumscribed to particular periods of monumental building, interspersed with long periods of inactivity, perhaps not shorter than a few centuries (200-300 years). We suggest that this interpretation may also apply to other megalithic European regions. Therefore, the research agenda on Megalithism should incorporate this topic in future investigations as it may demand a change in excavation strategies. In order to reconstruct the formation processes, we propose a methodological approach aiming to implement the techniques of stratigraphic excavation and the chemical and pedological characterization of the sediments in megalithic archaeological contexts. Ultimately, our proposal is to treat barrows as paleoenvironmental archives.