The Spanish Government, through its Secretaría de Estado de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación (State Secretary of Research, Development and Innovation), approves our application for further funding for our ongoing research at the Antequera Dolmens Site. The project “Megalithic Biographies: The Antequera Monumental Landscape in its Temporal and Spatial Context (BIO-MEGA)” has been awarded a 103.000€ grant for the period 2018-2020. The epistemological framework of reference for this project is provided by the biographical and landscape approaches to prehistoric monumentality, as previously successfully applied to other major megaliths, thus leading to a considerable expansion of previous culture-historical approaches. To this end, a robust team of specialists in multiple scientific disciplines has been assembled, including scientific dating (radiocarbon, OSL, Th-U), geoarchaeology (characterisation of lithic raw materials, archaeo-seismology, geophysics) as well as archaeo-environmental and material culture studies. The main aim of this project is to consolidate and expand the high-resolution archaeological approach already in place for the understanding of the complex patterns of temporality and territoriality of the Antequeran site. A second major epistemological stand of this project is the study of the significant collections of materials and empirical records derived from excavations carried out at the site in the last 30 years and which remain unstudied and unpublished. In this respect, Project BIOMEGA assumes an explicitly non-destructive (or minimally destructive) approach to archaeological heritage centred on the recovery, analysis and interpretation of evidence available in the collections from the more than 12 excavations carried at the Antequera megaliths and associated sites in the last three decades.
