The new hypothesis about the Menorcan taula enclosures proposed by the archaeologists Antoni Ferrer, Irene Riudavets, Gerard Remolins and Cristina Bravo was part of the last SER Historia radio program, broadcasted on January 3rd. Ferrer and Riudavets explained their interpretation of these religious spaces, published a few months ago in Complutum, a magazine specialized in history and archeology edited by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
In the paper "Doors to a symbolic world: a new interpretative proposal on taula enclosures from Menorca", the authors study the parallels between the structures of the taula enclosures and the domestic spaces of the Post-Talayotic period and propose a hypothesis that the taulas would be a symbolic door between the world of the living and the world of the gods.
Parallels with the houses of the Post-Talayotic period
Interviewed by Nacho Ares, host of the well-known radio program, the two archaeologists detailed their findings on these enclosures that are, as Ferrer recalled, one of the peculiarities that make Menorcan Talayotic culture so unique. “Today, no one doubts that these taula precincts were sanctuaries. Figurines depicting divinities have been found in these sites, such as the Egyptian deity Imhotep discovered in Torre d’en Galmés or the bronze bull of Torralba d’en Salort. Remains of food and banquets were also found, indicating that celebrations related to the divinities had taken place,” explained Riudavets.
The parallels between the structure of the taula enclosures and the Post-Talayotic houses led them to the idea of the house of deities and the house of mortals: “In this context, the taula occupies an analogous position to the one that occupies the door that gives access to the main room inside the houses. That’s when we propose that the taula would be a symbolic door, a connection between the world of the living and the afterlife,” according to Ferrer.
This idea of false doors related to a religious and symbolic world is relatively common in the protohistoric Mediterranean, as the archaeologist pointed out: “We have examples in the Etruscan world, in Sardinia and even in the Roman world. The best known cases, however, are the false Egyptian doors. In the paper we also conduct a statistical study comparing the proportions of the doors and the taulas, concluding that there is a correlation between the metric proportions of the two elements.”
How did they come to this conclusion?
Surprisingly, the conclusion did not arise from the observation of a taula or a house from the Post-Talayotic period, but rather from the excavations of an earlier Talayotic period building at the Cornia Nou site, before the taulas existed. "Dr. Lluís Plantalamor had already proposed that it could be a precedent for the taula enclosures," Ferrer commented. “Externally, it resembles a taula enclosure but the internal layout is very different. At one point, we realised that in this building the position of the door that separates the first area from the second is equivalent to the one occupied by the taula in the taula enclosures. We started pulling the thread from here and analyzing the houses of the Post-Talayotic period, we saw that there were more things that fitted together,” added the archaeologist.
Listen to the entire program here.