0181 – Luz 20 ditched enclosure

Location: Mourão municipality, Évora district, Alentejo, South Portugal.
Chronology: Chalcolithic
Bibliographic references: Valera, 2006; Becker & Valera, 2012.

Surveyed by Era company in 2004, in the context of the construction of Alqueva dam, Luz 20 is a double ditched enclosure with stone structures inside. Those works will be published next month included in a monographic study of several interventions done there in the same process.

Later, in 2010, it was submitted to geophysical survey (caesium magnetometry) in the context of NIA’s research project “Plans of ditched enclosures and Neolithic cosmologies: a landscape, archaeoastronomical and geophysical approach” financed by Calouste Gulbenkian Foudation.

The results confirmed the existence of the two ditched enclosures, of circular and concentric tendency, several circular pits and a large perfectly circular chamber of a possible tholoi structure.

Above is the magnetogram with the survey areas overlaid, showing the inside ditch and part of the outside, matching the areas were they were identified in the archaeological excavation.

However, in Portugal, geophysics continues not to be use as a regular tool in these kinds of infrastructure projects.  And they keep bumping into enclosures.