ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to address two main issues: how do we (as archaeologists) see the past? And also, how do we represent the past? In asking these questions, my principal concern is to explore the relationship between archaeologists and archaeological sites; the engagement from which past discourse emerges. In order to explore those questions I will take as examples the research that has been carried out in the Iberian Peninsula on the ‘walled enclosures’ dated from the third millennium BC and my own research on the pre-historic site of Castanheiro do Vento (also a walled enclosure dated from the third millennium), located in the North of Portugal.1 I’ll argue that the traditional interpretative regime that sees these sites as fortified settlements represents the past in frozen images that become stereotypes and, in this way, appear as a symbol of domination and domestication of the past. I also think that those images of the fortified settlements offer a familiar past where we desire to recognize ourselves, the nostalgic other that we imagine we once were (the familiar past is fiction too and has no basis on any reality). This sense of familiarity is achieved by the representation, for example of houses and families, of a gendered division of labour, (women weaving, men transforming mineral into metal), by talking about children, adults and old people. This speech erases all the doubts that the archaeologist experienced during their research. It appears as a clean statement where the past reveals itself as a self-evident thing which carries the familiarity that archaeologists desire in order to feel comfortable with their work.
