Upper Morgado Shelter, Still a Peripheral Funeral Context, or Perhaps Not? (Tomar, Central Portugal)

Abstract

The Upper Morgado shelter is a karst cavity located in the Nabão river valley whose material culture is in many aspects associated to the dolmen world. This shelter was used and reused in a long diachrony (since Neolithic times until the Early Bronze Age). Exchange and /or Interchange is confirmed through the occurrence of some metal artefacts that observed a complete set of relationships with items found travelling through the Portuguese Estremadura and Alentejo, across borders to Almeria and as far as far as France. The upper Morgado shelter fits the purpose of a long-term study where the thesis that the funerary features themselves travelled across borders as ideological exchange. Recent research found several ritual actions regarding the systematic burial of individuals of both sexes and of all ages. Since the primary burial, in an unstructured pit, that with time transforms itself into a Chalcolithic ossuary; further complemented with vestigial nuclei of human bones from the Neolithic. Those ossuaries were posteriorly displaced and containerised in a circular rock structure, with small rock niche-ossuary structures containing a limited number of unstructured bones. All this material culture behaviour results in the complex nature of this site.