New anthropological data on the Mesolithic communities from Portugal: the shell, middens from Sado

• DOI: 10.1007/bf02436370
• Publication Date: 2006-08-09T09:17:57Z
• Authors: E. Cunha; C. Umbelino; F. Cardoso
• Keywords: Mesolithic; Assemblage (archaeology)

The Portuguese Mesolithic communities are commonly related with the shell middens from Muge from which nearly 300 human skeletons were recovered. There is, however, another important Mesolithic Portuguese site: the shell middens of the Sado Valley, south of Lisbon. Mainly excavated in the 1950s and 1960s by the staff of the National Museum of Archaeology in Lisbon, eleven different shell middens were located (Arnaud, 1989) from which near one hundred skeletons were recovered. In 1982 a long-term multidisciplinary research program, directed by Arnaud, was initiated to relocate and restudy the large amount of artefacts retrieved. Last year, another project involving the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Portugal, in terms of paleobiology, started several anthropological analysis of the series bridging this period where the Sado ones are included. In the present paper we present some demographic and paleopathological aspects of Sado assemblage. Despite some of the skeletons being calcified and paraffin embedded, which precluded some anthropological aspects, the general state of preservation allowed a valid paleobiological research. Moreover, in some cases it was possible to reconstruct the original position of the individual interments.