The Castro de Vila Nova de São Pedro, a massive hillfort in Santarém, Portugal, dates back to the Chalcolithic period (Copper Age) approximately 5,000 years ago, making it 2,000 years older than the famous northern 'castro culture' of the Iron Age. This fortified settlement features three concentric rings of walls up to 5 meters high and several meters thick, protecting a central redoubt that served as a granary and storehouse for precious commodities like copper tools. The site, which supported a community of 200-300 people over 800 years, demonstrates how the Neolithic revolution enabled communities to form, trade, and build massive defensive structures, though archaeologists still cannot determine where the inhabitants buried their dead.
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Deep Dive
Before Castles: Discovering Portugal’s Colossal Chalcolithic StrongholdAdded:
These walls may look like a typical rural wall here in Portugal, but they’re different.
These walls surrounding a very large enclosure date back to prehistoric times.
This is the Chalcolithic “castro” de Vila Nova de São Pedro.
Let’s explore!
The “castro” or hillfort of Vila Nova de São Pedro is NEAR Santarém in the district of Lisboa! [My dumb mistake. Sorry!!]
It’s outside the town of Vila Nova de São Pedro, from which it gets its name.
It’s located on a hilltop to the north of the town.
The people in Vila Nova de São Pedro are proud of their famous castro, and there are signs directing you to it.
“Castro” is the Portuguese word for a settlement, usually on a hilltop, that is surrounded and protected by walls.
I’m going to use the term “castro” in this video because it’s a good, short term.
But it also might cause some confusion.
There is a huge and famous “castro culture” here in Portugal, located in the far north.
That culture existed during the Iron Age, in the final millennium BC.
The Castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro, along with others here in the Estremadura region of central Portugal, is much older.
These castros date back to the Chalcolithic period, two thousand years before the northern “castro culture.”
When you reach the site, there’s an information board in both Portuguese and English.
Walking up to the castro, you can see that it’s big, but it’s really a jumble of stones and grassy slopes, with a few visible walls.
It’s kind of hard to see what’s so special about it …until you get inside.
When you arrive at the castro and walk in, it’s a huge site. It’s very impressive, but without understanding the details it’s hard to put it into context.
When I came on a visit with an archaeological team, the amount of information was immense.
This is a fascinating place that has been investigated for years, and is still being investigated.
I will try to give you a short explanation.
This central area here in the middle is called the first line of walls, but they’re not necessarily the oldest.
There’s a lot of things that they don’t quite know all about this site: they’re still figuring it out.
Was this castro built from the centre out or from the outside in? It’s a little unclear.
What they do figure is that this central area – the redoubt, the central enclosure for this castro – was the final line of defence.
What it typically was used for was for storage.
There’s a small hole here that was used for grain.
There’s a cistern at the side here, that was used for water and beside it was an oven for baking clay.
They figure these stone walls would have been faced with clay to make them smooth and appear nice.
There is a large hole in the middle that they’ve identified as a dwelling place, but this generally wasn’t a city.
They figure this was a kind of granary or a storehouse, a barn in the centre, to keep all the materials that people might need if they were being attacked.
The walls were built to provide defence, and the sheer size of them shows their effectiveness.
But they also stop the visitor from appreciating the proper position of this fortified settlement.
If you come to visit this place on your own, it’s tempting when you see these gentle grass slopes that lead up to the top of the walls to climb up there and enjoy the view.
But there is a sign at the front saying “please stay off the walls.”
Please do.
Because if you climb up on these walls you could be damaging this very important archaeological site.
So please: keep your feet on the ground and enjoy the aerial views of this site from this video.
From the air, the countryside looks almost the same as it would have been five thousand years ago when this castro was built.
The stream in the valley below, the Ribeira da Maçussa, would have been much fuller and more navigable, but otherwise a rich and verdant landscape.
Peaceful and green.
But it wasn’t peaceful. The people who lived here had to defend themselves from outsiders.
They built enormous fortified walls around their community and, more importantly, around their precious commodities.
This castro, and others like it, were built to protect both the people in the community as well as their wealth.
During the end of the Neolithic, improved methods of agriculture, such as using oxen to plow larger areas, allowed people to produce crops and livestock in abundance.
They were able to trade with other communities, obtaining goods like tools, jewelry, and more …including the precious new commodity: metal.
The Chalcolithic period is also known as the Copper Age, as this is when people started developing the ability to create metal.
No longer limited to just using stone tools, they could produce lighter, sharper, more versatile tools and weapons.
The people in this settlement didn’t produce their own copper, but they obtained copper tools and other artefacts through trade with other castros that did.
So the central line of walls protected the wealth: food, tools, pottery, livestock.
Most of the people would have lived outside the walls, close to their farmland.
They would have come inside the walls during times of attack, probably inside the outer rings of walls.
Coming around outside, you can see the structure of the castro.
There’s the first line of walls in the centre, the central line, and then there’s a surrounding circle of walls that go around it.
I’m actually standing on it right now.
And the third circle of walls would have been out beyond that way, and you can see some of the stones out there.
They haven’t been completely excavated or completely rebuilt, but archaeologists are still finding new things at every level.
The archaeological work done here is an interesting story in and of itself.
The site was discovered by archaeologists in 1936, and there was a long campaign of excavations over the next thirty years.
This was during the time of economic and social hardships, including during the Second World War.
People in the community were hired to help out with the excavations, and their contributions were valuable to the archaeologists and the income was incredibly valuable to the community.
After the site was declared a National Monument in 1971, a new campaign of excavations was begun by the Portuguese Association of Arqueologists, and again they have worked with the community.
There is a commemoration of this collaboration on the project’s website and YouTube channel.
At various points outside the walls, you can really see how tall they are.
They’re at least 4m, high if not 5m, and they’re extremely thick.
This was a huge amount of stone that was worked here, including very large stones that could have weighed hundreds of kilos.
The amount of work that it took to create just the central redoubt here is huge.
When you think about the three lines of walls, the amount of work here is enormous.
The scale of this work shows how successful the Neolithic revolution was.
As people formed communities that stayed put and raised crops and livestock, and improved techniques over generations, their communities grew and were able to work together on massive construction works.
They still continued to live in wooden houses, which haven’t survived until today, and still continued to build megalithic tombs, the construction of large fortifications showed that many hundreds of people worked together over long periods of time.
While this marked an age of increased warfare, it also indicated an age of increased communal success and cohesion.
This castro was in use for many many centuries, and many generations of people lived and worked in this area.
Not necessarily in the central redoubt, but in the whole area: farming, hunting, etc. And then it disappeared.
Why? We don’t really know.
Did it succumb to its own complexity: it reached a level of size that couldn’t be supported by the area any more? Possibly.
Did climate change have something to do with that? That’s possible too.
Was it simply warfare and people were overwhelmed by opponents? We don’t really know.
There are lots of questions when we study prehistory, and sometimes we don’t have answers.
Or if we have answers, they can only be tentative based on the data we have and that might be changed when we get new information.
It is one of the things that makes it exciting for me to study prehistory.
I find it fascinating that some place like this that had life for thousands of years, and had thousands of people living here: there’s only so much we can know about it and we can probably never know everything.
I think I got carried away with some hyperbole.
The community that would have supported this castro would have been maybe two or three hundred people.
The castro shows an occupation of about 800 years, which eventually would have reached thousands of people… but only in the course of the 40 generations of people living there.
Walking around you can see places where there’s active archaeological work going on.
There’s a lot of work still being done here, and a lot of new discoveries being found.
But listening to the archaeologists here, it’s amazing how much they’ve discovered here and how much is still left unknown.
Things that they know are often at the macro level.
They know about commerce in the area between this castro and other castros.
But there’s other things that they don’t know, like where did they bury their dead?
They haven’t found any necropolises or any grave areas here.
They have seen some funerary ornaments and elements from graves, but they haven’t found any human remains and they’re not quite sure where the dead were buried.
To better understand what the archaeologists have discovered about the community, it’s very helpful to see the artefacts that have been found in the castro.
To do that, we have to travel down to Lisbon, to the Archaeological Museum of Carmo.
That’s the home of the Portuguese Association of Archaeologists, and there’s a special section devoted to the castro of Vila Nova de São Pedro.
A large model of the castro shows what it would have looked like while it was occupied: with smooth clay plaster covering the rough stone walls.
The model doesn’t show the second and third rings of walls completely – it only shows sections that have been excavated.
In a large display case, you can see a big selection of the artefacts found: stone and copper tools, ceramic pots and loom weights, beaded necklaces, cylindrical limestone idols, and more.
With imagination, you can picture some aspects of life for people who lived in the castro: weaving cloth, cooking, hunting, and even worshipping.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this vist to the Castro de Vila Nova de São Pedro.
If you want more information, I’ve got a page on my website, prehistoricportugal.com, with lots more information including links to other sources, including the one that the archaeologists who are studying it maintain, which has all kinds of information about their work.
As always, please do give me a like and subscribe.
I’m going to be visiting lots more prehistoric sites in the weeks and months to come.
Thanks for watching!
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