ABSTRACT
Archaeological research on the prehistory of northern Portugal began in a scientific manner only some twenty-five years ago. The region, comprising the three provinces of Minho, Douro Litoral and Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, is an immense territory covering over 20,000 km2 from the Galician border in the north to the municipalities (concelhos in Portuguese) on the left (southern) bank of the River Douro in the south. Research since 1975 has focused on three principal domains: megalithic tombs and cemeteries; ‘settlements’; and rock-art sites. This work has established the general framework of the Neolithic, Copper and Bronze Ages, both in chronological and distributional terms. The entire time period covers more than 4,000 years, from the end of the 6th millennium to the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. It is clear, however, that an enormous task has still to be accomplished to compensate for the lack of research before the mid 1970s. A particularly urgent requirement is the establishment of closer connections between the evidence from northern Portugal and that from Galicia and the Northern Meseta, the adjacent areas of Spain. The prehistory of north-west Iberia needs also to be placed more clearly in its palaeoenvironmental setting.
