摘要：During the Environmental impact Assessment for the new Monte Novo irriga-
tion Block, which is related with the implementation of the Alqueva Project, a large Roman villa
was identified at a place named Monte da Mesquita (São Manços, Évora). the mitigation stra-
tegy concerning the eventually threatened archaeological heritage at Monte da Mesquita would
be to undertake watching brief by archaeologists when a large infrastructure — a water pipeline
— would be inserted crossing the area. in this manner, when the arable ground was removed by
machinery near fifty pits dug in the soft rocky substrate were discovered at Casarão da Mesquita
3 (CMESQ3), not far from the Roman villa. the preservation by record of all those structures
was approved by the authorities and the excavations were carried out by archaeologists from
ArqueoHoje, an archaeological company. the field works revealed that those pits were filled up
with earth containing probable kitchen refuse, fragments of pottery, and, in two of them,
human burials. the artefacts recovered from those negative structures point out to a chrono-
logy from Middle to late Bronze Age, with the exception of three pits which chronology can be
ascribed to a late Roman period. Radiocarbon dating of several samples (charcoal or bones)
confirms the referred chronologies. Besides lots of ceramics, namely high carinated bowls and
burnished pottery, some archaeometallurgical remains connected with the processing of bronze
alloys — a stone mould for bronze flat axes, bits of slag and copper minerals — were also recove-
red indicating that bronze metallurgy was performed at the site. the analysis of the charcoal
remains reveals the human use of cork-oak, olive-tree, ash and strawberry-tree wood, reflecting
the regional presence of Mediterranean sclerophyll cork-oak and olive-tree formations and their
related scrubs, as well as the deciduous riparian forest. the two human inhumations had not
any associated funerary gifts and the individuals, one in each pit, were buried in a foetal position
as is usual during Bronze Age. One of them was radiocarbon dated. the date — Sac-2248
2990±60 BP — points out to a late Bronze Age (or to the end of the Middle Bronze Age) chro-
nology for that inhumation. Several archaeological sites of the same chronology and with the
same kind of negative structures are known near Casarão da Mesquita 3. At trigaches (Beja)
region and also at the Portuguese left bank of the river guadiana, other archaeological sites very
similar and with the same chronology of those ones were recently identified
