Circling the Square

Last Spring, Cornelius Holtorf has been (once again), with his team, excavating at Monte da Igreja, near Évora (Central Alentejo, Portugal.
His work has been concerned with the live story of a megalithic monument (a small dolmen), coming up until the present days.
Close to the megalithic grave there were surface evidences for a Roman settlement, and, in the excavation, a muslim coin has been found.

Cornelius has been teaching in Cambridge for some years and, for the moment, he is teacher in the Swedish University of Lund. Though he is doing a very serious work, Cornelius doesn’t lack sense of humour: in his last excavation at Monte da Igreja he left his visitors surprised with a provocative method of excavation: one of the trenches open to have a wider insight in the Roman structures, instead of quadrangular, was circular…

Of course, with a modern Barker-Harris methodology, and a Total Station on the site, there is no need at all to keep the “traditional” lay-out of the excavations; but someone had to show it.

and Cornelius is not at all a squared mind…

As an answer to that stimulus, we (me and Leonor Rocha) decided to replicate with a window in the trench, at our current excavation of a Neolithic site (Barroca 1), in Mora (Central Alentejo).