La sepultura de Belmeque (Beja, Bajo Alentejo). Contactos con el Egeo durante el Bronce Final I del suroeste de la Península Ibérica (1625-1425 AC)

Abstract

The tomb of Belmeque, an artificial cave dug in the rock, it is the richest of all the Bronze Age of the Southwest Iberian Peninsula. Present grave goods with one pottery with a incised vertical decoration, 2 daggers with silver rivets, 1 one-edged bronze knife, 13.8% of tin, with 4 gold rivets and the back cover of a fine gold plate and, finally, 9 silver rivets, perhaps of 2 belts. The knife is an Aegean model, for a sacrifice ritual, that we do not know in other burial of the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula, although it is not necessarily an import. Its better parallel is a one-edged knife of the grave 52 of the necropolis of Prosymna, located in the hillside of the sanctuary of Hera in Argos, the Heraeum, of the Late Helladic I, 1625-1500 BC. The rivets have between 70-75% of gold and 25-30% of "white" gold or electrum, present in the groups A₃ and A₃C of Hartmann, that have their better representation in the shaft graves of the Grave Circles of Mycenae in the Middle Helladic III-Late Helladic I. On the another hand, the presence of gilded in the back of the knife of Belmeque has also its better parallels in the shaft graves of the Grave Circles A and B of Mycenae and in the Tholos of Vapheio, Laconia, during the Middle Helladic III-Late Helladic IIA, 1675-1450 BC.

The grave goods of the Middle and Late Bronze Age I of Southwest Iberia are very modest, especially in weapons of copper or bronze, with hardly 12 daggers, and some awls. The richest tombs appear from Late Bronze Age I, ca. 1625-1425 BC, with some beads of necklace in gold and blue fayence, that also appear in Ireland and Great Britain, toward 1700‑1550 BC, coincident with the phase Derryniggin. This increase in metallic objects, included the silver and the gold, until then do not know, it can be resulted of the mining of tin in the zone of Neves-Corvo, Lower Alentejo. Its development perhaps explain that will be in this region where appear the stelae of Alentejo and after are concentrated the stelae with the earliest writing of the Southwest, being installed Phoenician settlements as Tavira from the 8th century BC onwards in the coast of the Algarve.