Archaeologists recover 2,000 prehistoric artifacts in Alpiarça

Archaeologists from the University of Lisbon have recovered more than 2,000 lithic artifacts dating back approximately 300,000 to 350,000 years during an excavation at the Vale do Forno site in Alpiarça.

The project aims to better understand Lower Paleolithic human occupations in the region and reconstruct the prehistoric environment through laboratory analysis. Researcher Carlos Ferreira noted that the site is distinguished from other known archaeological sites in Portugal and Spain due to its high degree of preservation. He described it as a “primary context,” where the stone tools remain essentially where they were originally left by prehistoric humans.

The Vale do Forno site was first discovered in the early 1990s during work coordinated by Luís Raposo, the former director of the National Museum of Archaeology. The current excavation campaign, which began in 2024, seeks to clarify the sedimentary and stratigraphic context, chronology, and function of the materials found at the location.