i n t roduc t ion

T
he 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 pre-
historians for over a century (Figure I.1).
Discovered in hundreds of Late Neolithic (3500–2000 BC) burials through-
out 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.
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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 oc-
casional 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 south-
ern 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 dur-
ing 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

Lillios, Katina T.. Heraldry for the Dead : Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, University of Texas
Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443348.
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 Copyright © 2008. University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

f ig u r e i . 1 .
Plaque from Olival da Pega (Évora, Portugal). Photograph by author,
courtesy of Museu Nacional de Arqueologia.

Lillios, Katina T.. Heraldry for the Dead : Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, University of Texas
Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443348.
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 i n t roduc t ion

f ig u r e i .2 .
Region in southwest Iberia in which engraved plaques have been found.

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 got-
ten 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
Copyright © 2008. University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

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, un-
til 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 out-
side, 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

Lillios, Katina T.. Heraldry for the Dead : Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, University of Texas
Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443348.
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 i n t roduc t ion

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, about seeing with new eyes, and, most importantly,
about seeing with multiple eyes. Writing the book has been—and I hope reading
it will be—a visually, intellectually, and emotionally stimulating exercise in ap-
prehending a body of material culture through a diverse array of theoretical lenses.
Throughout it, I engage a range of epistemologies and methodologies in regard to
the engraved plaques—critical historiography, formal analyses, experimental stud-
ies, spatial analyses, and interpretative frameworks inspired by memory and vi-
sual culture studies. This study seeks to engage with what Michael Herzfeld (2001)
has called the “militant middle ground” in anthropology, in which structure and
agency, materialism and idealism, and humanism and scientism occupy a shared
intellectual space. Thus this book does not seek to contain the plaques in a seam-
less explanatory package. Theories, I believe, should be tools that generate new
questions, provoke new insights, and organize information. They are not intellec-
tual straightjackets. Many questions will remain unanswered, ambiguities will be
identified, and contradictions will be teased out. One of my intentions is that this
book, as well as the perspectives that it draws upon, will stimulate new pathways
of inquiry. While this may be the first book dedicated to the Iberian plaques, I cer-
tainly hope it will not be the last.
Although the Iberian plaques have been known for over a century and have been
interpreted in a variety of ways, most theories about the plaques have been firmly
lodged in idealism, an approach that seeks to explain human behavior and material
culture through people’s shared values, beliefs, or religious practices (Aunger 1999).
The engraved plaques are found in burials and are decorated, which has led most
archaeologists to apply idealist models that center on the religious practices and
Copyright © 2008. University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

artistic traditions of prehistoric Iberians. While many intriguing questions within

this framework have been proposed (such as what the plaques may have depicted),
many aspects of the plaques, particularly their material and social dimensions,
have remained unaddressed. How were the plaques made? How long did it take
to make one? Where were they made? How was their production and distribution
organized? Were they the work of specialized artisans? Were they worn or used
during a person’s life or were they made at the time of a person’s death? Are there
meaningful patterns in their design? Are different plaque types found in different
regions? How did making and using the plaques structure the lives of ancient Ibe-
rians? Why, indeed, were they made at all?
This is also a book about identity and, specifically, the creation of identities dur-
ing a critical juncture in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. In this book I take
identity to be a “relational and sociocultural phenomenon that emerges and circu-
lates in local discourse contexts of interaction rather than a stable structure located

Lillios, Katina T.. Heraldry for the Dead : Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, University of Texas
Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443348.
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 i n t roduc t ion

primarily in the individual psyche or in fi xed social categories” (Bucholtz and Hall
2005:585–586). In other words, identity is not inherent in individuals or groups but
is the product of engagement, interaction, and ultimately the “social positioning of
the self and other” (ibid.:586).
During the Late Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula powerful economic and
social forces structured the creation of new identities. Human populations were
increasingly tethered to a residential base, an outcome of their intensification
of agricultural production. At the same time when this residential stability was
emerging, however, we also see evidence for increased long-distance travel (at least
as experienced by some individuals and groups) to acquire important raw materi-
als from the Alentejo, such as amphibolite for axes and adzes, variscite for beads,
and copper for tools and weapons. I suggest that the polarization of experiences
and knowledge, differentiating those who traveled from those who stayed closer to
home, crystallized in new social identities. I also argue that the encounters of those
traders and travelers on the open plains of the Alentejo—coming from diverse re-
gions of the peninsula, perhaps speaking different (mutually unintelligible?) dia-
lects, and competing for the valued resources of the Alentejo—further contributed
to the emergence and materialization of social distinctions.
The social landscape of the Late Neolithic, such as it was, also would have in-
stigated profound changes in mnemonic practices in order for groups to maintain
and legitimate rights to these economic and symbolic resources far from their resi-
dential bases. In fact, the material record of the Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula
suggests that such transformations occurred—in the reuse of sacred objects, the
circulation of the remains of the dead, the mimesis of ancestral landscapes, and
the rituals that brought the living and dead together in liminal spaces that both
ordered and transcended time, by mobilizing “deep time” (Boric 2003).
Thus this book is also about memory and about how people construct their
pasts. While memory studies are very much in vogue in academic circles, includ-
ing archaeology (Herzfeld 2003; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2003),
Copyright © 2008. University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

few archaeologists were concerned with memory when I first began thinking seri-
ously about the plaques. But, in the delicately controlled lines and hatching of a
plaque that so exquisitely preserve the careful handiwork of a person living 5,000
years ago, one cannot help experiencing, on an intimate level, a sense of shared
humanity. As part and parcel of recognizing that humanity comes an awareness
that people of the past had their own pasts and their own stories about how they
came to be, where they came from, and who they were related to. Once I began to
consider these dimensions of Neolithic lifeways, through the material qualities of
the plaques, I could begin to ask new questions about the plaques and ultimately
contemplate the possibility that they were memory aids, heraldry for the dead,
and indeed writing.

Lillios, Katina T.. Heraldry for the Dead : Memory, Identity, and the Engraved Stone Plaques of Neolithic Iberia, University of Texas
Press, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/york-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3443348.
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