Prehistoric ditched enclosures and necropolises in Southern Iberia: a diachronic overview

In this paper, we shall briefly describe the main features of Southern Iberian Final Neolithic and Copper Age enclosures, and will examine how they relate in space and time to Prehistoric funerary contexts. We will attempt to show how this relationship changed through time. In the 4th millennium BC, during the Final Neolithic, both megalithic tombs and ditched enclosures were built. However, very rarely they are close in space. In the 3rd millennium BC, coinciding with the Chalcolithic, necropolises of tombs (tholoi and hypogea) began to form around ditched enclosures of the period. However, this process only occurred at a few sites – the 'mega-sites'.