The excavations undertaken in Conimbriga since 1939 and recent studies have exposed, completely or in substantial extensions, the remains of more than twenty residential buildings of the roman town, evolved from the pre-roman settlement, of which the essential of its non-roman plan survived. Conimbriga is, hence, a prime site to understand how various types of domestic buildings play a specific role in an urban fabric, and how these types represent (or not) specific moments in time, in the evolution of a town which appears to be an atypical example in the province and in the western Empire as a whole.

The archaeological site of Eira Velha is located near the village of Lamas and used to be integrated in the civitas of Conimbriga, in Roman Lusitania. Recent archaeological fieldwork allowed discovering a junction of cobbled roads and several buildings, covering a broad chronology between the middle of the 1st century and the end of the 4th century. The presence of the said crossroad seems to have determined the settlement s spatial organization leading to its interpretation as a way station, dedicated to the traveller’s rest. Appearing as part of Conimbriga’s road map, they represent a part of this civitas viae vicinales.

With over 100 years of study and dissemination, the mosaics from Conimbriga are an outstanding group of this Roman decorative art in the extreme West of the Empire. Recent research on the domestic architecture of the town as allowed for those studies to be put in a general perspective and some conclusions drawn on the activity of the local workshops over the span of five centuries (1st BC - IVth AD). These conclusions respect both to technical and artistic matters, such as the volume of the activity, the public or private nature of the decorated buildings and the style of those mosaics, and to ideological issues, such as the figurative motifs preferred in the decorative programs, where everyday life, heroic cycles and broad mythological themes have an important presence.

This book aims to unlock the potential that the archaeology of Roman Portugal offers for our wider understanding of Roman imperialism. The archaeology of Rome’s westernmost frontier is extraordinarily rich, and presents several particularities – from ocean resources, marble and metal mining to specific settlement forms and cultural traditions – to name but a few that deserve attention as well as contextualisation in the wider western Mediterranean. An explicit goal of the volume is to open up a discussion on how the Portuguese panorama compares to other areas of the western Mediterranean. Different research traditions and language issues have hindered comparative analyses. All chapters are in English and several take a wider Iberian or Mediterranean perspective. The volume revolves around four sections. The first one regards the initial phase of Roman encroachment and expansion in western Iberia. The second section discusses economic developments during Roman rule by looking at the material categories of marble and table wares. The third section presents case studies of settlements and settlement organization in present-day Portugal and Spain. The last section, then, foregrounds religious, ritual activities and issues of cultural identity in both Spain and Portugal. It is intended for both specialists and students who want to know more about this much under-represented area at the fringes of the Roman Empire.

The principal aims of Urbanisation in Roman Spain and Portugal: Civitates Hispaniae in the Early Empire are to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of the urban systems of the Iberian Peninsula during the Early Empire and to explain why these systems looked the way they did. While some chapters focus on settlements that were cities or towns from a juridical point of view, the implications of using a purely functional definition of towns are also explored. Key themes include continuities and discontinuities between pre-Roman and Roman settlement patterns, the geographical distribution of cities belonging to various size brackets, economic relationships between self-governing cities and their territories and the role of cities as nodes in road systems and maritime networks. In addition, it is argued that a considerable number of self-governing communities in Roman Spain and Portugal were poly-centric rather than based on a single urban centre. The volume will be of interest to anyone working on Roman urbanism as well as those interested in the Iberian Peninsula in the Roman period. See: https://www.routledge.com/Urbanisation-in-Roman-Spain-and-Portugal-Civitates-Hispaniae-in-the-Early/Houten/p/book/9780367900779

This book can be accessed at: https://www.archaeopress.com/Public/displayProductDetail.asp?id={E6EACE9A-9F1C-4B8B-A3FF-9516841E6E85} The knowledge on the patterns of Roman rural settlement in central Portugal is highly variable. While some regions have been intensively surveying and the results have been published, other, on the other hand, have never been the subject of a study of any sort. This is the case with the coastal area located between the Douro and Mondego rivers, which is particularly understudied. Though there is a long tradition of work, archaeological investigation in this region has mostly aimed to study hillfort sites whereas landscape analysis have been often overlooked. Based on an extensive bibliographical survey of reports, old publications and books, as well as the available data in the Endovelico database, it was possible to record and map 160 Roman sites. The analysis of chronology, morphology and distribution of these sites allowed to formulate several hypothesis about the some aspects of Roman rural settlement in this region and its relation with the wider landscape, especially regarding the exploitation of natural resources. Particularly, this study highlights the identification of previously unknown Roman mining activity at Serra do Buçaco and raises some doubts about the exploitation of fishing resources. Ultimately, and albeit asserting the need for further archaeological investigation, this study is a contribution for a better understanding of the Roman past in this peripheral region.

The present paper is a limited work of synthesis about the general historic dynamics in Northern Portugal, roughly between the 2nd century BC and the 2nd century AD. These chronological barriers encompass two historic epochs: the later phase of Iron Age, and the beginning of Roman period. Being aware of the arguable validity of this traditional periodization, we will try to describe the evolution of the local communities, since its typical organization with the fortified sites as a general pattern of settlement, through the gradual complexity of society, with the appearance of the known oppida sites as first examples of urban experiences. We will explain then the integration of the region in the Roman Empire, and the consequences of this political and cultural deed, that led to a different settlement organization and cultural identity of the communities that inhabited Northern Portugal in the beginning of the Common Era. Being a large period of time, and one with a particularly complex set of historical events and cultural change, an overview of this phase is limited by different archaeological sources, with works made since late 19th century till nowadays, in a large number of sites, corresponding to different kinds of settlements, studied by teams with quite different historical views and research methods. The ideas that we are going to present correspond, therefore, to an attempt to have a rational and realistic general view of this quite interesting historic phase. Different themes and sites are here highlighted, like some of the most known Iron Age oppida, like Briteiros, and the centre of the Romanization process in Northern Portugal, the city of Bracara Augusta.