Passage graves and related monuments: some thoughts on megalithism from the south slope of Serra d’Ossa (South Portugal)

Abstract

The emergence and development of funerary Megalithism must have occurred during the second quarter of the 4th millennium BC, most likely within a framework of some structural and volumetric diversity, certainly far from the linear process of architectural development that has been proposed since Manuel Heleno. Indeed, this will have been a truly crucial moment in the process of neolithization, with the foundation of new landscapes and the strengthening of the process of territorialization, which will determine, as it happened again in the Middle Ages, the reappropriation of any sign of ancestry, as is patent in the passage graves overlays to significant old spaces, sometimes with burial areas.