The engraved stone plaques of prehistoric Iberia are mind traps. Their hypnotically repetitive designs, the eyes that stare out from some of them, and their compositional standardization have intrigued prehistorians for over a century (Figure I. 1).¹

Discovered in hundreds of Late Neolithic (3500–2000 BC) burials throughout southwest Iberia (Figure I. 2),² the engraved plaques have enjoyed an enduring place in the scholarly imagination. The nineteenth-century Portuguese medical doctor Augusto Filippe Simões (1878:53) wondered whether they might be “amulets or insignias or emblems or cult objects.”³ After the eminent Portuguese geologist Carlos Ribeiro showed Florentino Ameghino, the Argentine naturalist,...

Ever since antiquarians began discovering the engraved plaques in the nineteenth century, they have emphasized their homogeneity. Indeed, the plaques are remarkably coherent in their form and design. The Portuguese prehistorian Vergílio Correia (1917:29) noted this nearly a hundred years ago, when he explained that relatively few plaques were published because they were so similar to one another. However, most archaeologists probably highlighted their similarity because they believed that the plaques were part of a singular ideological phenomenon. As I discuss later in this chapter, archaeologists had long thought the Iberian Peninsula was colonized in the Late Neolithic by people...

Like an old friend, each plaque has something reassuringly familiar about it. But, like old friends, the plaques can also bear startling surprises. Sometimes a plaque displays a unique combination of motifs. Sometimes it exhibits a bizarre or highly idiosyncratic style. And sometimes it reveals an unusually high level of technical precision and artistic finesse. In this chapter I wish to convey some of this dazzling variety in the formal design and style of the plaques. It is this tension between insistent uniformity and bold idiosyncrasy that makes the Iberian plaques so compelling and offers, I suggest, a key to...

Despite the brilliant creativity they often display, the engraved plaques of Iberia have traditionally been viewed as static entities. Prehistorians have rarely considered the technical skills, cognitive decisions, social relationships, and embodied knowledge that were activated to produce them and that generated their distribution throughout southwestern Iberia. Their biographies—their raw material acquisition, manufacture, distribution, and consumption by skilled and social actors in a dynamic historical and sociopolitical landscape—have generally been ignored.

As with the life histories of people, the life histories of objects are the outcome of social structuring forces as well as the properties inherent in their...

So far I have primarily discussed the plaques as objects that were acted upon and manipulated by individuals and groups, and I return to this approach in the next chapter. Viewing material culture as the medium onto which and through which human agency acts is the traditional approach in archaeology and, when carried out with multiple methodologies, can indeed produce rich and varied insights. But an approach to material culture that views it merely as a passive receptacle of human values, skills, desires, needs, and information is incomplete. Material culture itself has an agency (Gell 1998; Wobst 2000; Dobres and...

In this chapter I address perhaps the most intriguing quality of the Iberian plaques: the possibility that they—or at least the majority of them—were a form of writing. The identification and decipherment of ancient writing systems are contentious fields, entangled with the twin threads of power and identity. From a historical perspective, power and writing are inextricably linked. Scholars associate the development of writing with the emergence of political centralization, the control of people, property, and knowledge in large bureaucracies, and elite religious practices (Hooker 1990). The significance that scholars attach to literacy is itself a product of...

During the Neolithic of the Iberian Peninsula, human groups engaged in mnemonic practices that centered on funerary rituals performed at collective burial monuments.¹ At these stages for the performance of ritual (Barrett 1994) Neolithic peoples orchestrated their memories by manipulating objects, such as the engraved plaques, architecture, bodies, animals, and fire. The death of a person set in motion a series of decisions, negotiations, and rituals, which included the preparation of the body, the determination of the appropriate monument for burial, the selection of objects to be buried with the dead, and feasting. Some bodies went through further processing, such...