Antiquities Exhibits

During the last two centuries of the second millennium BCE a series of settlements were established along the coastal areas of northern Portugal. Their noble elite celebrated ritual banquets and participated in an extensive network of interchange of prestige items such as  cauldrons, knives, bronze vases, roasting spits, flesh-hooks, swords, axes and jewelry, from the Mediterranean up to the British Isles. But this network appears to collapse at the beginning of the first millennium and their open settlements were gradually replaced by fortified hill-forts constructed of earthen walls, battlements and ditches, which enclosed an inner habitable space. Trade dwindled to just the production of various axes and tools. Then, beginning in the 6th century BCE, the "Castro" culture once again began to expand and widespread trade returned driven by Carthaginian merchants who brought imports of wine glass, pottery, and other goods.  The Carthaginians constructed emporia that sometimes ...

The Visigoths were an early Germanic people who, along with the Ostrogoths, constituted the two major political entities of the Goths within the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity, or what is known as the Migration Period. The Visigoths emerged from earlier Gothic groups, including a large group of Thervingi, who had moved into the Roman Empire beginning in 376 CE and had played a major role in defeating the Romans at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 CE. Relations between the Romans and the Visigoths were variable, alternately warring with one another and making treaties when convenient. Under their first leader, Alaric I, they invaded Italy and sacked Rome in August 410 CE. Afterwards, they began settling down, first in southern Gaul and eventually in Hispania, where they founded the Visigothic Kingdom and maintained a presence from the 5th to the 8th centuries CE. The Visigoths were never called Visigoths, only Goths, until Cassiodorus used the term, when referring to their loss against C...