Mesas do Castelinho

Archaeologists Amílcar Guerra and Carlos Fabião describe Mesas do Castelinho as an example of "failed urbanism" in southern Lusitania (Guerra and Fabião, 2010). In the Roman Republican period, between the end of the 2nd century and the early 1st century BC, the settlement was given a careful orthogonal plan, with three north-south streets and the regular layout you would expect of a future Roman town.

Except the town never came to be, and the excavators themselves refuse the word: "the absence of any sign of public architecture prevents us from considering this settlement a town". The explanation they give for the abandonment is their own interpretation, argued from the Roman itineraries and not independently documented: the Augustan creation of Lusitania, Pax Iulia as the legal seat 70 km away, the pull of the Augustan mines, a road network that bypassed the Caldeirão pass and, above all, the choice of Arandis, probably Garvão, as seat of the civitas. Off the roads, off the map: Mesas do Castelinho was abandoned in the early 2nd century AD, after more than half a millennium of continuous occupation.

It is a 2,000-year-old lesson about the power of infrastructure: whoever is left off the network disappears. Few places tell it as clearly as this hill in the Baixo Alentejo.

The destruction of the site was not one episode but three. In the late 1950s the then landowner levelled the upper platform, destroying most of the interior of the Islamic fortification. In the 1960s, the earthworks for planting the olive grove that still covers the lower platform disturbed the layers above the Roman levels. And in late 1986 a machine worked the hill for more than two weeks in search of treasure, opening a cut over five metres high in Platform B. About a third of the site was destroyed. The Almodôvar municipality attributes the 1986 destruction to treasure hunters chasing the riches of the Lizard-Man legend; treasure-hunting on the hill, though, has a "long history" already on record in 1960.

It was a heritage disaster, but it had an unexpected consequence: it launched the monument's scientific career. The 1986 destruction triggered salvage excavations led by Carlos Jorge Ferreira (IPPC). In 1988, Carlos Fabião and Amílcar Guerra, of the University of Lisbon (UNIARQ), were invited to take over the research, and systematic campaigns ran from 1989, with Susana Estrela as co-coordinator from 2006. In 1990, Mesas do Castelinho was listed as a Property of Public Interest (Decree no. 29/90, DR I Série no. 163, of 17 July 1990).

Excavation ended with Sector A4 in September 2018, after eight sectors had been opened; in June 2022 there was a further non-invasive ground-penetrating radar survey and a campaign listed that summer, under the name PROMECA. The finds include a stela bearing the Southwest Script, spotted at the end of the 2007 campaign in Rua 1 of Sector B3 and lifted in September 2008. It had been reused face down in a fill preparing the circulation surface of the street, some three centuries younger than the inscription itself. And a terracotta human head, found in 1995 in Sector A1 in secondary position, which the only archaeologist to publish on it reads as "a toy, or even a decorative object", on display in the village museum. Archaeobotany is among the site's strongest evidence: barley is the most ubiquitous crop in every phase, on soils already impoverished by the 4th century BC. And a pit from the start of the Republican occupation yielded ninety fig seeds, with two broken vessels that refit and an iron object, a deposit that, in the authors' own hedged wording, "porventura", perhaps, marked the inaugural moment of that space, rather than a meal.