Mesas do Castelinho (Almodôvar): A case of a failed Roman town in southern Lusitania

The archaeological site of Mesas do Castelinho (Almodôvar, southern Portugal) is an Iron Age hill-fort settled in the late fifth century BC. As there is no evidence of any major natural resource in the nearby area, we presume its location is designed to control a natural pass across the uplands at the border between the coastal area of the Algarve and the Alentejo plain. We have strong evidence for early contact with the Romans and no signs of major conflict in that process. The site had a carefully arranged urban setting, dating from Roman Republican times (late second-early first century BC), but the house plans do not seem to reproduce any known typical Italic model. From the reign of Augustus on, many signs of decadence become quite obvious and a final abandonment occurred in the late first or early second century AD. The creation of Lusitania as a Roman province, with its new political and administrative organization, the increasing exploitation of the region’s mineral resources and the laying out of the new road network, condemned Mesas do Castelinho to a peripheral condition. The site no longer had a relevant role in the new provincial landscape. Human settlements in the area became dispersed, just small rural sites with no relevant town nearby. Only under Muslim rule, when new small and weak regional powers emerged, was the site occupied once again. Hence the archaeological site of Mesas do Castelinho can be seen as a good case study for an aborted urban setting from before the creation of the Roman province of Lusitania