The 'croziers' of the agro-pastoral societies of southern Portugal (last quarter of the 4th / early 3rd millennium BC)

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, João Luís
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/12437
• topic: Neolithic; Chalcolithic; 'Croziers'; Portugal; Inventory; Classification; Signification; Neolítico; Calcolítico; Báculos; Inventario; Clasificación; Significación

This paper constitutes the first-ever characterization study of the artefacts referred to as 'croziers', to their similarities with episcopal staves or croziers and shepherds croziers or croziers. Several possibilities are considered to explain the existence of these artefacts of a symbolic and exclusively funerary character: An inventory of the known exemplars is presented hereby. There is a special concentration in central Alentejo, encompassing the megalithic region of Reguengos de Monsaraz, and two other clusters, much less important, limited to a few specimens, in the Eastern and Northeastern Alentejo, always related to the presence of megaliths. The study of the decorative elements and their organization resulted in the identification of three main iconographic groups. The set of decorated exemplars from the westernmost domain, situated between the Tagus River and the Atlantic Ocean, constitutes a group with particular characteristics as both sides of the items are decorated. Excepting one item, all the artefacts display decoration on one side only with the exception of some undecorated specimens; the heads of these exemplars are always oriented to the left. This feature can be correlated with the way they were ritually held: admitting that they were wielded in the right hand of the deceased, only the convex longitudinal edge could be functional, which is consistente with their use as machetes, among other possibilities that are also the subject of dicussion.