With the help of my Portuguese friends, I was able to rediscover a fantastic piece of history, at least fantastic in the eyes of an aging stone mason, once a history major.

Citania de Briteiros was an Iron Age village in the hilly interior of Portugal. Today this well-preserved site sits in the middle of a waving woodland of eucalyptus and maritime pine. At its founding, the woodland was comprised of oak trees and cork. While each Castro village was an autonomous entity loosely affiliated with neighboring habitations, this site was just a small cog in a vast Castro culture stretching from the Douro River north into Galicia and Asturias, Spain. The Portuguese refer to these villages as citanias, while the Spanish know them as Castros. Briteiros may have been home to 3000 people at its peak, around the time of the Roman conquest in the late 1st century BC. Overall, the Castro population may have reached 700,000 stretching over the two countries, neither of which existed at the time. The inhabitants were part of the broader Celtic-European population. The curator of the museum at the Castro of Santa Trega on the Spanish side of the river separating Galicia, Spain from northern Portugal, the Minhos River, stated that the Celts occupying the Castros were somehow different from the Celts of the rest of Europe. He couldn’t quite tell me in what way they were different. I will leave the definition of what is a “Celt” to my Irish friends in Sweeney’s Pub. (Nope. Not getting into it!)

“Have they ever done any DNA testing on the Castro people to compare to the rest of Europe,” I asked him.

“No, there is no DNA. The ground is too acid. It eats the bodies,” he said.

Quick overview of the Briteiros site. Stone carved hieroglyphics date to 3000 BC. Evidence of a human settlement appears as early as the end of the Bronze Age and into the beginning of the Iron Age, around 1,000 BC. With the advances in metallurgy, the Iron Age gave the inhabitants a chance to work the local granite outcroppings. They began cutting the stone with their new iron tools and replaced the wood, reed and waddle houses with stone houses, sometimes building directly on the same foundations as the reed and waddle houses.

In the book, “Citania de Briteiros e Castro de Sabroso: An historical and archaeological account,” published by the Society Martins Sarmento, we can confirm, “The marks left by the tools used to extract granite are visible on several rocky surfaces. The cut line was marked by successive holes made with chisels in which wood wedges were lodged. The wedges were dampened, which would crack the rock.”

The author goes on to point out, “All the walls were built with stones previously prepared in order to obtain a regular face. This mastery of granite use is also visible in the perfect horizontal cuts made on some natural outcrops that served as pavement, either in interior compartments or in courtyards, as well as some sections of the roads.”

Most circular houses were surrounded by a rectangular wall which defined the family compound. This rectangular compound gave space for work areas, other structures, either round or rectangular, for storage sheds, space for cooking fires, acorn pounding, grain storage, and a hook from which to hang their fishing nets. The yard would have also held their chickens and maybe pigs.

The citanias thrived and the people, mostly peasants, lived on acorns pounded into flour and mixed with other cereals grown on the lower lands. They herded cattle, sheep and goats on the upper hillsides. They fished the rivers. The work was hard but there is little evidence they did not live in peaceful co-existence for long periods of time. There is evidence they traded not only with other Castros, bringing in iron ore and tin and other metals, but that they also had trading routes with the Carthaginians who ruled the western Mediterranean and traveled up the Atlantic coast before the power of their North African metropolis, Carthage, was broken by Rome in the Third Punic War.

But be sure, the Romans were on their way here too. (More later.)