Joaquim Oliveira Caetano e António Alegria

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According to the republican ideals, through museums society finds itself and takes care of the its past. And not only takes possession, as it, through the decontextualization of objects, changes them, replacing its early functions, values and symbolisms, for others, typically laic, of aesthetic beauty, of history contextualization, of national emblematic meaning. It is this new collective appropriation, essential to a laic State, that creation of the Republican Museums is funded upon, in a phenomenon that spans from the French Revolution and that expanded throughout practically all of Europe.

Interview: Carla Magro Dias e António Alegria

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In the 60’s, the archaeologist Henrique Leonor Pina carried out a series of archaeological findings that emphasized the importance of the megalithic culture in the territory of Central Alentejo. The culminating point was, in 1964, the discovery and the archaeological excavations carried out in the Zambujeiro Dolmen (Anta Grande do Zambujeiro), one of biggest funerary monuments of the Iberian Peninsula. With its personal and very emotive style, Henrique Leonor Pina reconstitutes, in this interview, the memory of those years, allowing us to live deeply the context in which the excavations had been carried through.

Archaeological diggings made in 1990, in Évora, in the area occupied by the ancient Dominican convent of Santa Catarina de Sena revealed, among other pottery, a small dish, with the 1767 chronogram. The piece, included in the Évora Museum pottery collection, possesses a very simple decoration, restricted to a rim with a three bead motif, in blue and manganese purple. With other pieces of the Évora Museum from the city’s extinct convents, we can characterize the type of consumption and the production of normal faience, in Lisbon, in the first half of the 18th century.