The engraved plaques of Portugal and Spain are some of the most intriguing art of prehistoric Europe. Since the late 19th century, archaeologists have excavated over 1000 engraved slate plaques from burials in southern Portugal and Spain dating to the Copper Age (3000-2500 BC). The plaques are made of slate or schist, trapezoidal or rectangular, 15cm in height, and generally have a bipartite structure, with the lower portion of the plaque made up of 2-14 horizontal registers of repeating geometric motifs, such as triangles, zigzags, and checkerboards (figure 1). Dated to the earliest complex societies of the Late Neolithic and Copper Age (3000-2500 BC), they are found principally in collective burials of southern Portugal and west-central Spain. When in good association with individuals, the plaques are found placed on the chest or alongside the body of these individuals. The occasional appearance of anthropomorphic features on the plaques inspired most early prehistorians to interpret the plaques as the Mother Goddess, whose cult had supposedly diffused from the eastern Mediterranean and whose worshippers brought other components of ‘civilized’ life, such as metallurgy, to Iberia. Although this model was overturned in the 1960s when radiocarbon dates and their calibration demonstrated that metallurgy and other features of ‘civilized’ life in Iberia were contemporary with or actually predated their ‘sources’, most prehistorians still view the Iberian plaques as depictions of the Mother Goddess.

In recent years, there have been renewed attempts to interpret the slate plaques in social and symbolic terms by Portuguese and Spanish scholars such as Lisboa (1985) and Bueno Ramirez (1992). Lisboa (1985) disputed the Mother Goddess attribution of the slate plaques, as only a few of these plaques unquestionably depict anthropomorphic figures, and none are obviously females or deities. Lisboa focused her argument, not on what the plaques may have represented, but on what they may have meant and on how they may have functioned symbolically and socially. She proposed that the plaques be seen as “ordered and meaningful, in the sense that they are being used to transmit messages” and suggested “they had a heraldic function not necessarily associated with individuals” (1985). Lisboa did not offer, however, a test of this compelling model. In a similar vein, Bueno Ramirez (1992) viewed the decorations on the plaques as ethnic identifiers of contemporary groups, and their distribution as evidence of regional exchange systems. While the notion of the plaques as ethnic identifiers is reasonable and, indeed, consistent with the thesis of Lisboa, Bueno Ramirez did not take into account other possible mechanisms that might also explain the distribution of the plaques, such as the movement of individuals and groups who may have shared a common idea of how the plaques were to be composed and decorated. In spite of these advances, archaeologists have not considered the fact that iconography, meaning, and function as interrelated phenomena which must, ultimately, be reconciled.

What is most striking about the plaques is that while they are each unique in their specific details, they are overwhelmingly consistent and standardized in their basic form, structure, and grammar. It was this observation that led me to more seriously consider them as heraldic emblems. Their use as heraldry may have been particularly important in the Alentejo of southern Portugal, where the majority of the plaques are found, and where the acidic soils are not conducive to the preservation of human remains.  Recognizing that genealogies are critical to personhood and power in complex societies known archaeologically and ethnographically, I developed the working hypothesis that the number of registers on the plaques recorded the generational distance between the deceased and an important ancestor, and the motif signified a person’s clan/lineage affiliation (Lillios 2002, 2003). Based on the hundreds of plaques I have catalogued, all the evidence supports this interpretation. For example, most tombs have plaques in continuous sequences, as one would expect assuming that these tombs housed the remains of related kin over many generations (figure 2). While alternative interpretations can be posed, such as that the registers record the age at death of the deceased, or the number of children they had, none account for the evidence as well as the genealogical model.

Bibliography of Iberian Plaque Studies

[back to top]