Los ajuares

Arrowhead

CFlint Knife

Adze

Chisell

Double axe

Mace

 

    The grave goods are funeral offerings placed inside or near a tomb They usually are a group of objects and food that was deposited next to the dead bodie during the megalithic burial ceremonies. The type of found objects became more complex as the megalithic phenomenon reached a greater development. At the beginning, when dolmens were simple polygonal chambers, we found carved stone tools, as arrowheads, flint sheets (used like knifes) and microliths. These are small pointed stones, that could be inserted in axes or harpoons. It is worth noting the presence of arrowheads, in a period in which the economy based on the hunting, had been replaced by another one in which the domestication of the cattle and the earth culture were preferred. That is the reason why their placement among the grave goods is probably symbolic, with the intention of showing that those men still felt like hunters. Also appear several tools of polished stone, as axes or adzes, small green beads, made out of variscita, employed in the manufacture of necklaces and other objects of adornment, and some remains of smooth pottery, without decoration.

    In more complex dolmens as those that have a passage that leads to the chamber, it appears a more elaborated lithic industry, with new tools like chisels or maces and artifacts of double cut (bipennes), as the double axes. The simplest forms also survive during almost all the megalithic era.

    The pottery begins to be decorated, mainly, using two motifs, the first one practicing small incisions in the surface, as it was the case of the tetralobe bowl appeared in the barrow nº 5 of the necropolis of Buriz (Lugo), unique in its originality, shamefully lost, that seemed to represent the Neolithic goddess mother (although not less sad has been the fate of the megalithic chamber that sheltered it, and the destiny of another chamber whose orthostats were stolen in the year l994, in spite of being an impressive monument) and the second motif is known with the name of bell-shaped pottery because of the adoption of a shape in form of a decorated inverted bell with symmetrical crossing bands. A good sample are the well known vases found in the barrow nº 242 of Veiga de Vilavella in the municipality of As Pontes that are, at present, in the Faculty of History of the University of Santiago de Compostela.

    They are rare, however, the metallic remains because of chronological reasons. When they are found, it is convenient to think in reusabilities of the dolmens at very later times after their construction, as it happens in the case of the vases and bronze heads appeared in the excavations of the dolmen known as Mina da Parxubeira and in the necropolis of Marco de Camballón.

    For a better information anything better than going to the works of the Galician specialists like Professor Ramón Fábregas, author of exhaustive studies on the stone tools found in the Galician megaliths.

Smooth pottery

 

 

Bell-shaped pottery

 

O Buriz (Back view)

 

 

O Buriz (lateral view))

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