Sistema Simbólico e Economia na Pré-História Recente do Sudoeste Ibérico

A Linguagem dos Artefactos Ideotécnicos

Abstract

This study deals with a diachronic approach to the symbolic and religious evidence from the first agricultural communities (6th millennium cal BC) to the societies of the Late Chalcolithic/ Early Bronze Age (2^nd half of the 3rd millennium cal BC) of Southwest Iberia.

Revisiting material culture, mainly from the south of Portugal, from a socioeconomic and long-term perspective allows the construction of a comprehensive interpretation of ideoartefacts, symbols and art as a symbolic system dialectically articulated with the economic structure of the different social formations considered.

Thus, our narrative moves between the first peasant communities and their path towards the consolidation of societies based on kinship relations, supported by megalithic ideology, and the dawn of the early Bronze Age, when traditional society based on kinship gives way to an unstable chiefdom-oriented society, with centralized and personalized power in the last quarter of the 3rd millennium cal BC.