
Telmo Pereira- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Autonomous University of Lisbon
Telmo Pereira
- PhD
- Professor (Associate) at Autonomous University of Lisbon
Associated Professor at Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa |
Invited Adjunct Professor at Instituto Politécnico de Tomar
About
181
Publications
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Introduction
I study Prehistoric hunter-gatherer adaptation and lithic technology. I focus on the Middle Palaeolithic sequence and the Pleistocene/Holocene transition in Western Iberia. In the field, I do surveys, excavation, and raw material sampling. In the lab, I use lithic technology, raw material characterization, and experimental archaeology.
Keywords:
Palaeolithic
Acheulean
Mousterian
Middle Paleolithic
Lower Paleolithic
Upper Paleolithic
Mesolithic
Epipaleolithic
Hunter-gatherers
Middle Stone Age
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 2019 - present
June 2019 - April 2020
January 2014 - December 2018
Education
January 2007 - December 2010
September 2005 - December 2006
September 1998 - June 2001
Publications
Publications (181)
This short report presents newly discovered Palaeolithic rock art panels within the Ocreza Valley (Lower Tejo River), central Portugal, comprising several engraved zoomorphic figures, including auroch and horse. Together, they substantially increase upon the previous headless horse found in 2000, and the style of the engravings is identical to Uppe...
Tumuli and megaliths mark the landscape of Eurasia and are rich in data, mystery, and legends. Books about them are often monographic or have a local range. This collection of essays highlights and brings together 74 authors from 16 countries, from Portugal to Japan and Indonesia. They offer a diversity of regional backgrounds, theoretical perspect...
1. Tumuli and Megaliths in Eurasia: two archaeological typologies, partially convergent, and a broad geographical space are the references of this book and of the Congress that preceded it.
The term megalith is conventionally applied to funerary or non-funerary structures, but rituals, dating back to the Neolithic, have worldwide expression, from P...
Artefacts usually collected from funerary contexts of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods are almost exclusively related to the depositions of human remains, but occasionally there are reports of some peculiar ones. The most common of these are usually macrolithic stone tools that are considered exogenous, related to older occupations of the vic...
The Ocreza Valley (Lower Tejo River), central Portugal provides evidence for a new Upper Palaeolithic rock art complex in western Iberia. Recently discovered panels, comprising several engraved zoomorphic figures that includes an auroch (Panel OCR20), another with a horse figure (Panel OCR22) and a bolder with another engraved auroch figure (Panel...
The ages of the geomorphological and sedimentary records from the Peniche coastline are characterised and calculated by absolute dating and identified 5 marine terraces below the culminating platform, attributed to marine incursion dating back to ~3.7 Ma. The terraces located above the current marine abrasion platform are correlated with periods of...
The west of the Iberian Peninsula is an important region for the knowledge of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic because it was where human dispersal westwards in Eurasia ended. At the same time, it was an ecological refuge whose diversity of resources and landscapes allowed for cultural idiosyncrasies. Although research on the Palaeolithic in Portu...
The Last Glacial Maximum brought long-term harsh climatic and environmental conditions. Because of that, human groups had to adapt to such changes, which was done through the development of new technologies, ecodynamics and settlement patterns. Buraca da Moira is a cave in Central Portugal with LGM human occupations in which faunal remains with dif...
Epoch or as an Event. The author uses a rich bibliography and presents an interesting essay about it. Still, I have some comments. 1. The Anthropocene may make sense for the non-specialized public and professionals working with short-term periods, including historians and historical archaeologists. However, for experts working with long-term period...
Western Iberia is one of the richest areas for open air rock art in Europe. Panels with figurative and abstract engravings have been diachronically created in various rock formations next to major rivers and their tributaries. The origins of this pattern of behaviour can be traced back to the Upper Palaeolithic, with distinctive themes that include...
Resumo. Os primeiros estudos sobre as práticas funerárias pré e proto-históricas de Lafões remontam ao final do século XIX, mas são as “Antiguidades Pré-Históricas de Lafões”, da autoria de Amorim Girão, que fornecem a primeira visão de conjunto. A partir deste trabalho inicial a investigação tem sido irregular e centrada em cada um dos municípios...
Throughout prehistory, landscapes were repeatedly subjected to both global and localized climatic fluctuations that changed the regional environments where human groups lived. This instability demanded constant adaptation and, as a result, the functionality of some sites changed over time.
In this light, the western coast of Iberia represents an e...
POST-GRADUATION: Experimental Archaeology in Prehistory and Protohistory
Since the 19th century, the Lower Tejo River (western Iberia) provide extensive evidence of Neanderthal occupation. However, due to the absence of long-term, well-funded projects and of fully-equipped research facilities, we still do not have a clear framework for the Neanderthal occupation of this crucial territory. Nowadays, probably more than ev...
To address firewood exploitation modalities to understand coastal adaptations is important to characterize the local landscapes and understand also the reliance on inland resources. Concerning hunter-gatherer communities’ inherent mobility and their growing reliance on marine resources during the Holocene, it is interesting to understand the role o...
In 2021, a new palaeolithic panel with rock art engravings on a schist outcrop was unearthed in Ocreza river. At the vertical surface of the panel appear the outlines of at least three zoomorphic figures. The use of metamorphic rocks as surfaces for artistic representations is a common phenomenon at open air sites situated near rivers in Portugal....
Manual de campo com os procedimentos de campo e laboratório de campo, nomeadamente de escavação e registo.
2nd Newsletter of the COST Action Integrating neandertal Legacy: From Past to Present
Beira Alta - Revista de Estudos da Região
Atas das I Jornadas de Arqueologia de Vouzela-Lafões realizadas de 14 a 16 de novembro de 2019.
This is the first issue of the iNEAL newsletter! With this issue, we are laying a flexible foundation for subsequent issues. We have structured the newsletter to inform you about the latest developments in the iNEAL project, to introduce you to projects, people and participating institutions or sites, and to recommend work that our members find int...
Abrigo do Poço is a rock shelter located in the karstic canyon of Ribeira das Chitas in the River Lis basin (Central Portugal). The site has an Epipaleolithic occupation overlying a Solutrean occupation. Despite the multiple available resources in the vicinity, the main activity during the Upper Paleolithic occupation seems to have been the exploit...
Resumo
As prospeções realizadas em Vouzela após os incêndios de 2017 identificaram uma mamoa inédita no Monte Cavalo. Referências antigas a um dólmen nesta área (entretanto desaparecido) suscitaram a sua escavação em 2019. Trata-se de uma mamoa de tipo cairn (15 m de diâmetro por 0,6 m de altura) com duas cistas (uma destruída) e uma estela gravada...
Field methods for the 2020's field season in the Ocreza Valley.
Finding common things from Portugal to Japan
Pre-Historic and Proto-Historic societies developed different ways to bury dead people. One of the most distinctive way was offering them to earth using positive structures as artificial hills, such as tumuli, mounds, and kurgans, of circular shape. Even though it involves different rituals and geograph...
This is a book especially dedicated to the general public and to students of Archaeology, History, Anthropology, Geology Heritage and other related fields explaining the archaeological investigation in the Neanderthal site Cobrinhos, and how it relates with human evolution, paleoenvironment, and the history of research about Neanderthals in Portuga...
This is a short description kurgan of the Tasmola of culture (8-5 centuries BC) that existed in Central Kazakhstan.
Significance
We report the remarkable discovery of an early Aurignacian occupation, ∼5,000 years older than any Upper Paleolithic site in westernmost Eurasia. The archaeological and radiocarbon data provide definitive evidence that modern humans were in western Iberia at a time when, if present at all, Neanderthal populations would have been extrem...
On the Iberian Peninsula, abrupt climate shifts during the Late Pleistocene impacted human and natural systems. Our knowledge of human adaptive responses to these climatic perturbations has improved in recent years with the development of new radiocarbon techniques that have increased the temporal resolution of cultural chronologies. At the same ti...
Conference Abstract and schedule
Editor
BioantTalks
Conference Committee
Vanessa Campanacho
Telmo Pereira
Africa is a key region to understand the emergence and evolution of humans and their distinctive cultural traits. Detailed information exists across the continent, but major areas still lack crucial evidence. One of the most under-represented regions in research about the Middle Stone Age (MSA) is Angola. The geographical position of Angola linking...
Studying lithic raw material sourcing, processing and distribution is helpful when trying to reconstruct the territory, ecology, and cultural practices of Neanderthal groups. The use of multiple methods in such analyses allows for more refined characterizations to be made, helping to distinguish between materials better than any single method. Alth...
Here we report the results of an integrated geoarchaeological survey to study Palaeolithic human settlement dynamics in the coastal region of Portuguese Estremadura. The region has been an important focus of human occupation across multiple glacial-interglacial cycles, including periods of well-documented abrupt climate instability during MIS 3 and...
Depois do ar, a água é o elemento mais importante para a vida no Planeta e para os seres vivos que nele habitam. A quantidade de água no planeta
Terra foi sempre a mesma, mas a quantidade em que ela esteve em cada
estado (sólido, líquido, gasoso) não. Isso resultou de variações climáticas
decorrentes da forma como o próprio planeta Terra gira à vol...
O interesse arqueológico do local conhecido por Monte Cavalo, 3 km a poente de Vouzela, no atual parque industrial da vila, foi mencionado pela primeira vez em 1903 por L. Soares Valgode, um historiador local, que refere haver ali um “dólmen”. Mais tarde, A. de Amorim Girão dirá que o monumento terá “desaparecido sem deixar vestígios”, conclusão qu...
Use-wear studies rely heavily on experiments and reference collections to infer the function of archeological artifacts. Sequential experiments, in particular, are necessary to understand how use-wear develops. Consequently, it is crucial to analyze the same location on the tool’s surface during the course of an experiment. Being able to relocate t...
Navalmaíllo Rock Shelter is an Upper Pleistocene archaeological site in the Lozoya River Valley (Madrid, Spain) with a quartz-based Mousterian lithic assemblage. To understand the reasons behind an intense use of quartz over flint and quartzite, a mechanical experiment was carried out. Flakes from flint, quartzite, and local quartz were tested unde...
Cobrinhos (Vila Velha do Ródão, central eastern Portugal) is a Mousterian site found during factory construction in 2014. This area is located in the Lower Tejo valley, which is characterized in terms of geomorphology by six river terraces, numbered downwards (T1 to T6), with Palaeolithic industries associated only with T4 to T6. Terrace T4 was rec...
Video of the procedure to adhere the beads onto the sample. The video has been accelerated for convenience; the whole procedure was performed in approximately 2 min and 12 s.
Step-by-step instructions for the coordinate system function.
PDF export of the results of the ConfoMap template applied to all analyzed surfaces. Editable *.mnt files (which include the unprocessed surfaces) are available on Zenodo (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1479072)
Descriptions of the ISO 25178-2 parameters applied to all surfaces.
[The original file is in XLSX format but it is not allowed on RG. Feel free to ask for the raw data, or download them from Springer at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12520-019-00801-y]
Descriptive statistics of ISO 25178-2 parameters on both microscopes. n = sample size, min = minimum, max = maximum, SD = standard deviation.
Raw data, and R markdown scripts and HTML outputs of the statistical procedures.
All files are available on Zenodo (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2578975).
Values of ISO 25178-2 parameters and X/Y shifts for each surface.
The onset of the Holocene is marked by new human ecological adaptations that are associated with the origins of the Mesolithic in the Atlantic Iberia coast. During the Mesolithic, shellmidden deposits become one of the most relevant and interesting prehistoric archeological contexts, interpreted has the result of intensive human ecological exploita...
Reconstruction of Pleistocene environments and processes in the sensitive geographical location of westernmost Iberia, facing the North Atlantic Ocean, is crucial for understanding impacts on early human communities. We provide a characterization of the lowest terrace (T6) of the Lower Tejo River, at Vila Velha de Ródão (eastern central Portugal)....
In 2015, several disarticulated human skeletal remains were identified in the top layers of the prehistoric site of Buraca da Moira Rock Shelter (Boa Vista, Leiria), during the archaeological excavation carried out under the scope of the EcoPLis — Human Occupations in the Pleistocene Ecotones of the River Lis project. The recovery of chert, constiq...
RESUMO:
Os artefactos em sílex dos dólmenes da Lapa da Meruje (Vouzela) e de Antelas (Oliveira de Frades), cuja construção se atribui aos inícios do IV milénio a.C., foram analisados por forma a providenciar uma primeira imagem abrangente das estratégias de exploração, circulação e utilização do sílex no megalitismo da região de Lafões, uma das sub...
Cobrinhos is a Middle Paleolithic site found during the construction of a paper factory, in the winter of 2014, in Vila Velha do Ródão, Central inland Portugal. In this region, the staircase terraces has six steps (T1 to T6), but Paleolithic is only found in the T4, T5 and T6. The T4 is dated of ca. 340 ka to 155 ka, with Acheulean at the basal lev...
Fig 1. Poço Rockshelter. A: Location in the Iberian Peninsula. B: Location in the western coast with a 30 km range. Highlight for the continental platform in light blue, that was land during the most dry phases of the Pleistocene. Chert sources: a) XXX; b) XXX; c) XXX; d) XXX A B Perfil esquemático, voltado a Este, do Abrigo do Poço-2017 Legenda: C...
Discovered in 1962, the Columbeira cave has a Mousterian sequence dated between 101 and 35 Ka (U-series) and between 28,900 and 18,000 BP 14C. Excavations recovered abundant lithic implements and provided rich assemblage of vertebrates, including mammals, reptiles, birds and a remain of Homo neanderthalensis. In this work, authors present the taxon...
Gruta da Furninha is a coastal cave in Jurassic limestones, of marine genesis, some 850m to the SE of Cabo Carvoeiro (Peniche, Portugal). Its entrance is to be found at ca. 15m of altitude in the middle of the cliff. A rich and diverse fossiliferous set of Late Pleistocene vertebrates, including birds, was found there; they are currently stored in...
Caracterizam-se e interpretam-se os registos geomorfoló-gicos e sedimentares do Pliocénico e do Plistocénico do litoral de Peniche-Atouguia da Baleia (Portugal central). Foram identificadas e cartografadas superfícies de abrasão marinha aos: 33-36 m, vasta plataforma culminante, mas só preservada localmente e sobreposta por areias amarelas finas a...
RESUMO
A localização geográfica e o enquadramento ambiental ímpares da região de Leiria terão, desde tempos imemoriais, contribuíndo para a fixação de grupos humanos. De facto, várias são as evidências arqueológicas que atestam a presença humana na região desde o Paleolítico Inferior. Contudo, e para o Neolítico Final e Calcolítico, poucos são os d...
A construção da nova fábrica de papel Tissue, da empresa Paper Prime, S.A., em Vila Velha de Ródão, levou à identificação e escavação do sítio arqueológico Revelada 2. O sítio foi escavado até ao substrato geológico numa área superior a 170m2, tendo-se individualizado dezenas de unidades estratigráficas. Do espólio
arqueológico recolhido constam ma...
Enquadrado no projeto de investigação EcoPLis – Ocupação Humana Plistocénica nos Ecótonos do Rio Lis, o
Abrigo da Buraca da Moira situa‑se
no vale dos Murtórios (Leiria). O sítio corresponde a uma cavidade cársica
seccionada por uma pedreira artesanal, com uma sequência com níveis holocénicos e plistocénicos bioturbados.
Os níveis arqueológicos hol...
Através dos registos geomorfológicos e sedimentares, os rios fornecem relevantes arquivos de mudanças paleoambientais, nomeadamente paleoclimáticas e paleogeográficas. As sucessões sedimentares melhor datadas são as mais importantes, com as idades numéricas dos respetivos dos eventos sedimentares, de fósseis e de materiais arqueológicos, obtidas po...
The project EcoPLis - Human Occupations in the Pleistocene Ecotones of the River Lis started in central Portugal in 2015. It aims to understand the behavioural ecology of hominins during the Pleistocene in a region where sub-rectilinear rivers link the coast to the inland mountains through open riverine and canyon environments. This project is root...
Classification of lithic assemblages from prehistoric sites in Portugal is usually made by macroscopic inspection. Thus, sound insights on sourcing and acquisition paths are lacking. In order to test previous classification attempts, we used portable X-ray fluorescence to analyse a sample of flint artefacts from the Cardial campsite of Cerradinho d...
The cave-site of Gruta da Furninha is a coastal karstic cavity. In the late 19th century, excavation of the sedimentary infill of the cave allowed the identification of two lithostratigraphic units: a Holocene one dominated by sands, containing human bones and a Neolithic industry; and a Late Pleistocene one, containing a diverse set of fossils set...
This collection presents state-of-the-art approaches to the use of inorganic raw materials in the period known as prehistory. It focuses on stone-tools, adornments, colorants and pottery from Europe, America and Africa. The chapters intimately merge archaeology, anthropology, geology, geography, physics and chemistry to reconstruct past human behav...
The production and use of stone-tools have been seen as the greatest advance in humankind. Stone tool technology helped early hominines to gather more and better resources, compete with other animals and overpass dramatic environmental changes, creating the conditions for survival, adaptation and evolution. Thus, understanding the variability and o...
EcoPLis 2017: Manual de campo
EcoPLis 2017: Handbook of field work.
There are multiple hypotheses for human responses to glacial cycling in the Late Pleistocene, including changes in population size, interconnectedness, and mobility. Lithic technological analysis informs us of human responses to environmental change because lithic assemblage characteristics are a reflection of raw material transport, reduction, and...
Raw data.
Includes specimen numbers.
(XLSX)
Supplementary methods.
List of coded lithic traits and definitions. Includes .cfg code for E4 program.
(DOCX)