It’s not all drudgery and stone dust and swinging a hammer. For a quality stonemason it’s also planning, observation and research.

I’ve been planning a little trip of this so-called research, a sojourn to regions of my past. It is testament to my lucky fate that I have the health to venture out and that I have a jumbled history worthy of revisitation. But, in my own defense, it is no small task to accumulate a personal history rich in detail and event. Though, on the other hand, I believe most people, if they take the time to observe the details of their own lives, have exactly that -- good, bad, and ugly. So, I am off, with a passing note that I am fortunate to have a wife strong enough to let me go.

In 1980 I was in Portugal for the second time. There, I took a trip with my friend Jika in his car. We circumnavigated the north of the country. We escaped the wine-stained floors of the dark taverns of Oporto, soured by time and old men in shallow dark wool hats, and we found ourselves in the countryside between Guimaraes and Braga. I do not remember if Jika already knew of the archaeological site beforehand, or if we found it by chance like I think we did. But we landed on this hill.

The countryside was of gentle hills, covered mostly with silvery-green eucalyptus and pine. The gravel road wound up the hill and through the trees and came out upon a small parking lot. There was no signage, no indication of something important, just a shallow stone wall in front of us and intrigue beyond.

We stepped from the car, and I began to feel an envelope of history come over me, triggered by the enigmatic apparition slowly revealed to us. As we walked, our vision broadened with the changing curvature of the landscape. Before us lay stone foundations, a stone blueprint of an entire village. Here lay the partial remnants of vanished culture. I say partial because over time I have come to learn that there were hundreds of these villages, known to some as Castros, to others as citanias, or cividades. These villages formed a borderless culture stretching from southern Portugal into Galicia, Spain, and were divided between the coastal habitations and the inland villages. We stumbled upon an Iron Age treasure of early human stonework. Were these the first Iberian/Celt people to live outside of caves? Or, before stone, had they lived in huts of wood and reeds, long traceless?

The houses were near the top of the hill and as we looked down the hill there were concentric stone walls built around the hill as if elevation lines on a topographical map, each wall taller than the last and creating successive pasture lands down the hill until, after the last, highest wall, the longest wall – the one for wolves – the forest started. The houses were circular and inside a rectangle yard created by the smallest walls, the walls for chickens? A main street of cobblestones ran down through the whole village and carried water from the spring bubbling from near the top of the hill. The existence of such a strong and steady spring was probably the reason the village grew up on this spot. Water was life then too.

The feature which stuck with me all these years was the council hall. The council hall was the largest structure in the village and was also circular, like the houses, but maybe four times larger. The inside of the room was lined with cantilevered stone seats all around the circle of stone wall. Everyone sat in the room facing each other and this was how business was conducted and indications are this was a democratic enterprise. Let’s remember, it was not only the Greeks that played with democracy.

It took people with certain sensibilities to protect these villages and, usually, it was the action of a single dedicated individual stepping forward at the right moment in time to preserve these treasures of the past. How many were lost, buried, bulldozed cannot be known. They had no savior. These sites began to be appreciated in the late 1800’s and the early 1900’s and the site I visited was the love project of a single man. I see now there is a museum of the Castros near the village ruins. I hope to go there.

I am on my way to the Castro soon, to recover what I can of the memory and to contemplate the immense gap between human existences. Astrophysics tells us the Universe is set up in such a way that mankind might be able to travel into the future, but the Universe forbids travel into the past. Traveling into the past is highly likely to change the present and, Arnold Schwarzenegger excepted, that simply cannot be allowed.

To be continued from the field.