Ara to the Sun and the Ocean (Alto da Vigia, Sintra)
On a promontory north of Cabo da Roca (the Promonturium magnum for the Romans), close to the mouth of the Colares River, we find an archaeological site where the Muslims built, in the 11th century AD, a small ribat (religious and military complex) on the ruins of a temple in which the Romans worshipped the Sun, the Moon and the unknown Ocean (ignotus oceanus), most likely from the second quarter of the 1st century AD.
The selection of an altar collected there, currently on display at the Archaeological Museum of São Miguel de Odrinhas, in Sintra, to feature in a philatelic issue dedicated to Europe makes perfect sense. We thus represent a sacred place (locus sacer) from the Roman era, later the westernmost border of the European continent. We also pay tribute to the Portuguese humanists of the 16th century, such as Francisco d’Holanda, who paid special attention to the Temple of the Sun and the Moon, marking the moment of the recovery of Classical Antiquity in Portugal, an object of study in the History of Archaeology.
Child of Lapedo (Old Oil Press Shelter, Lapedo Valley, Leiria)
25 years ago, the team led by archaeologist Jãoo Zilhão excavated, in December 1998, the grave of a child of around four years of age, who lived in the so-called Gravetense, the Upper Paleolithic period. An international and multidisciplinary team was assembled to study and publish, under his guidance and that of Erik Trinkaus, the skeleton and funerary context, carefully deposited by the group of hunter-gatherers, which most likely included members of his family, in the shelter of the leafy Lapedo Valley. Using new methods of analysis it has recently been proposed to update the time interval in which the child lived to 27,800 to 28,600 before the present. This fact reveals what constitutes an important hallmark of Archaeology: the progress of research using continuous collaborations with other scientific disciplines. This unique tomb is central to understanding the evolution of Modern Man, as well as how the living came to relate to the dead. In 2021, it was classified as a National Treasure and is deposited in the National Museum of Archaeology.
