Thursday, April 17, 2014

Perdigoes idols (Part 1)

Anthropomorphic Figurines at Perdigões Enclosure: Naturalism, Body Proportion and Canonical Posture as Forms of Ideological Language (Valera, Evangelista 2014)

This paper isn't open-access, hopefully we'll see it soon.  Here's some initial observations. 

These male idols are typically found with burials according to Valera.  These burials are early Chalcolithic and within the large, ditched enclosures that in later time yield multi-regional Beaker items.  However, he is careful to point out that excavations continue and would like to better understand the site before jumping to conclusions.  As usual, the picture seems to be clouded by variability and monument reuse.

http://portugueseenclosures.blogspot.com/2014/04/0245-paper-on-perdigoes-human-figurines.html

A couple of thoughts...

The stylized lines on the faces of these men, at first glance, look like facial hair.  One interpretation regards them as facial tattoos, and there may be a reason for this, but I don't see it.  

The figure on the middle left has a faint resemblance to later human depictions in Celtic art.  That shouldn't be too surprising since this is Western Europe, but it is surprising to see this form this early.  The wavy lines may depict mustache braids and hair braids or dreadlocks.  Some temperate Europeans did do this with lime and egg yokes in the first millennium.

At the same time, these figures with possible eye insets look Near Eastern.

Found within this region are also the triangle head idols and other aspects of this culture that seem to originate in the Near East.  This also should not be too crazy a suggestion given the probable origins R1b-M269 and its likely Chalcolithic entry into Western Europe.

More on this later...


 (Valera, Evangelista, 2014)

http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/abs/10.1179/1461957114Y.0000000057?queryID=1%2F145113&journalCode=eja

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