Keywords

The recognition of human fossils in the first decades of the nineteenth century, with several discoveries in Europe, and the definition in 1865 of a new discipline, paleoethnology, during the 1st International Meeting of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology that took place in Spézia (Italy), generated great enthusiasm amongst Portuguese researchers (Athayde 1934) who began to look for evidence of ancient populations in the national territory (Fabião 1999; Martins 2007; Umbelino and Santos 2011). The archaeological record also contributed to the construction of national identity in response to nationalist movements that emerged in the nineteenth century.

After a period in which anthropological studies were carried out by persons with diverse backgrounds, in 1885 the discipline was created at the University of Coimbra (Tamagnini and Serra 1942; Areia and Rocha 1985), followed in 1911 by the Universities of Lisbon and Oporto (Xavier da Cunha 1982). In these institutions, anthropology arose within natural history, and as a consequence, teaching included comparative anatomy of human and non-human primates and fossils, and the universities acquired relevant teaching materials that included documented (i.e. of known biography) human osteological collections (Museu e Laboratório Antropológico 1985, 2016; Mendes Correia 1941).

At this same time, Portuguese museums, as what happened in many similar institutions in the world, start to benefit from ‘offers’ made by military men, scientists, priests and others who worked in the colonies or in other countries. Amongst the ethnographic materials sent to the museums were skulls and skeletons. As Dias (1998) noted, in the nineteenth century, anthropological collections appear to have been constructed specifically to demonstrate racial differences.

The period of the foundation of the discipline was followed by decades of studies on craniology and metric characterization of individuals, to evaluate if ‘miscegenation’ leads to the dissolution of the specific characters of the mainland Portuguese. During the dictatorship known as Estado Novo (1933–1974), these studies were justified by the urgent need to affirm the position of the country in the ‘civilized’ world and amongst the colonial empires. Interestingly, the same type of metric analysis and evaluations made in the individuals from the colonies were also undertaken in the home nation.

In the following decades, there was a general decline in the number of studies and excavations. After the Revolution in 1974, the (former) colonies were no longer the focus of anthropological studies. The Portuguese universities were restructured and modernized in the 1980s, and the scenario of physical anthropology changed around 1990, with a new wave of researchers that made the transition between the traditional biometrical studies and the international trends of anthropological/bioarchaeological investigation. Simultaneously, education and training of students was developed in bachelors, masters and PhD courses. At the same time, the number of human remains available increased as a result of excavations carried out all over the country in ancient necropoli during the construction of infrastructures such as roads and renovation of old religious buildings.

The aims of this paper are to investigate the motivations behind the constitution of collections, the excavations of human bones and the trajectories of the discipline in Portugal.

Skull and Skeleton Collections at the Foundation of the Discipline

Portugal is recognized internationally for the number and quality of the documented osteological collections assembled since 1882. Less known are the bone collections of individuals from overseas, both from the former Portuguese colonies and from other countries, which are summarized here. These collections and its collectors are the subject of the following two sections.

Documented Osteological Collections

The collection of assemblages of modern human remains, with the aim of furthering anthropological research and teaching, was possible within the framework of Portuguese law. Despite the presence of the inquisition in the country until 1821, the study of human cadavers was allowed at least since 1546 by the decree passed by King John III. The use of corpses in practical teaching was regulated in the eighteenth century (Abreu 2007).

The first collection with bones from individuals with biographic data was assembled by Francisco Ferraz de Macedo (1845–1907). This pharmacist and physician was born in Portugal but moved as a child to Brazil (Santos 2012). A former student of Paul Broca , he was the ‘patriarch of Portuguese anthropology’ (Tamagnini and Serra 1942) and considered ‘the first Portuguese [Physical] anthropologist’ (Ferreira 1908). Later in his career, Ferraz Macedo became devoted to criminal anthropology (Tamagnini and Serra 1942; Xavier da Cunha 1982). With more than 1023 skulls and one complete skeleton (Duarte 2017), gathering the Ferraz Macedo collection began in 1882 in the cemeteries of Lisbon (Tamagnini and Serra 1942), and it was donated to the Bocage Museum [Lisbon] in 1907 (Ferreira 1908; Cardoso 2006a, b). Unfortunately, in 1978 this collection was destroyed in a fire (Xavier da Cunha 1982; Rocha 1995) with only around 40 skulls and dispersed postcranial elements surviving (Cardoso 2006a).

At the University of Coimbra, the first documented collection was designated the ‘Medical School Collection’. The 585 skulls, amassed between 1896 and 1903 (Museu e Laboratório Antropológico 1985, 2016), from the Universities of Lisbon , Coimbra and Oporto , were collected by Bernardino Machado (Rocha 1995). Bernardino Luís Machado Guimarães (1851–1944) was born in Brazil and came to Portugal to study at the University of Coimbra, where he later became a professor (1885–1907) and was responsible for the creation in 1885 of the course of Anthropology , Human Palaeontology and Pre-Historic Archaeology at the Faculty of Natural Philosophy (Areia and Rocha 1985; Tamagnini and Serra 1942). He was also the director of the anthropological section of the Natural History Museum at the same university (Areia and Rocha 1985) and, in the words of Barbosa Sueiro (1944), ‘created the Museum annexed to the discipline’.

Bernardino Machado was very active politically, both during the monarchy and after the creation of the Republic in 1910. During his resulting absence, he was replaced at the University of Coimbra by the ‘substitute professor’ Henrique Teixeira Bastos (Areia and Rocha 1985).

He funded the Society of Anthropology, based in Coimbra, taught courses to nonacademic members of the public (Cursos livres), defended the education of women and held many political offices including president of the country from 1915 to 1917 and 1925 to 1926. His opposition to Antonio Salazar’s dictatorial regime led him into exile in Spain and in France.

Later, Eusébio Barbosa Tamagnini de Matos Encarnação (1880–1972), Machado’s successor at the University of Coimbra from 1907 to 1950, was also Minister of Public Instruction, during the government of António Oliveira Salazar, and the first president of the Portuguese Society for Eugenic Studies (Sociedade Portuguesa de Estudos Eugénicos) (Areia and Rocha 1985). Tamagnini amassed the ‘International Exchange’ collection (Rocha 1995), with 1142 identified skulls (Lopes 2014), and the ‘Identified Skeletal Collection’ comprising 505 skeletons, both deriving from the Municipal Cemetery of Conchada in Coimbra (Lopes 2014; Santos 2000). These collections have a small number of individuals born outside Portugal (Cunha and Wasterlain 2007; Lopes 2014; Santos 2000).

The University of Oporto housed a documented collection with individuals exhumed from the Cemetery of Repouso, collated by António Augusto Esteves Mendes Correia (1888–1960). He justified the formation of this collection on the grounds that there were as many studies on skulls, in Portugal as abroad, but few of complete skeletons (Mendes Correia 1917). This physician and first professor of anthropology at the University of Oporto (Tamagnini and Serra 1942; Mendes Correia 1941) combined academic and political activities: for example, he was the mayor of Oporto (1936–1942) and a deputy in the National Assembly (Matos 2012). According to Cunha (2010), curator of the archaeological and anthropological collections at the Natural History Museum, the exact number of individuals amassed by Mendes Correia is difficult to ascertain, but it is probable that there were 173 skulls of Portuguese origin, 125 of which are of known identity, 41 skeletons and more than 400 isolated limb bones and many mandibles. These human remains were divided into two collections: ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ (Cunha 2010, 2012). More recently, Cardoso and Marinho (2015/2016) published an inventory of the remaining 99 documented individuals from the original collection. The possible explanation for the reduction in number could be their transference to the Department of Zoology/Anthropology to be used in teaching (Cunha 2010).

At the Universities of Lisbon , Coimbra and Oporto , from the beginning of the anthropological studies until the 1950s/1960s, these collections were analysed according to district of birth of the individuals, and various measures, indices and angles were determined. The results obtained in these contemporaneous remains were compared with the individuals from archaeological excavations and with studies made in other ‘races’ and fossils. For Tamagnini (1934), all of humankind belonged to the same species, but there were superior and inferior races, and he warned of the problems of miscegenation. In the case of Portugal, these studies tried to prove that the presence of Muslims ‘moors’, mainly from North Africa , as well as miscegenation with inhabitants from the colonies (in 1551, e.g. Cristovão de Oliveira points out that 10% of the 100,000 inhabitants of Lisbon were slaves (in Estácio da Veiga 1887: 501)) had not altered the European nature of the population. The titles of these works are very suggestive of the contents, for example, Diameters and indexes of the Portuguese skulls, The prognathism of the Portuguese and The femur of the Portuguese, with similar studies for almost all the bones of the skeleton.

Overseas Collections

Portugal started systematic ocean navigations (so-called Descobrimentos) in 1415. The overseas expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries resulted in the creation of several colonies, most of which became independent in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Human remains were brought to Portugal from the former colonies of Angola, Goa, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé e Principe and Timor. However, apparently there are no bones from Cape Verde archipelago and from Macau. Brazil had become independent in 1822, therefore before the beginning of anthropological studies in Portugal. Scientific exchanges between Portuguese and Brazilian researchers existed but apparently not in an intricate way as can be confirmed by the chapter in Volume I of this series on ‘Bioarcheology in Brazil’ by Mendonça de Souza (2014). However, they mutually read their publications, researchers of one country were members of professional associations of the other, and conferences were presented on both sides of the Atlantic, with Mendes Correia visiting several institutions in Brazil in 1934 and 1937 (Matos 2013). Topics like race, in prehistory and in living populations, miscegenation and eugenics were of common interest to both Brazilian and Portuguese anthropologists (Matos 2013).

The study of the ‘indigenous’ from the colonies became of primary interest during the dictatorship regime, Estado Novo (New State) or the Second Republic (Santos 2012), which was created in 1933 and ended with the Carnation Revolution in April 1974. It held a ‘belief in the hereditary or cumulative environmental physical, and cultural inferiority of non-European populations’ (Santos 2012: S36). Notwithstanding this original position advocated by many researchers, the narrative changed in the 1950s, and miscegenation, considered inevitable in a colonial power like Portugal, became evidence of the ‘absence of racial prejudice by the Portuguese’ (Mendes Correia 1954). The Lusotropicalism (Luso-tropicalismo) , proposed by the Brazilian Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987), inspired by Franz Boas , was adopted by the Portuguese political system both at home and in official occasions abroad (Matos 2013; Santos 2012; Viegas and Pina-Cabral 2014). Lusotropicalism stressed the distinctive character of Portuguese imperialism and proposed that the Portuguese were more enlightened colonizers than other European powers.

In 1934, prior to the development of Lusotropicalism which happened after World Word II, Oporto hosted the 1st National Meeting of Colonial Anthropology, coinciding with the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition , organized by the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia, SPAE) founded in 1918 (Mendes Correia 1941). At this meeting, ‘race’ was a theme covered in several presentations. The studies analysed human remains brought from the colonies and donated to institutions in the metropolis by persons who worked in those territories or were collected during anthropological missions. According to the research done for this paper, these collections are now at the universities of Coimbra, Oporto and Lisbon .

At the University of Coimbra, the first group of crania was sent by the governor of Macau and Timor to the Natural History Museum in 1882/1883. According to Barros e Cunha (1894), the 35 skulls allegedly came from a battlefield, and most of them had been decapitated. The precise origins of these individuals have been the target of different interpretations analysed by Roque (2010b). In 1902, six of these skulls were loaned by Bernardino Machado to Rudolf Martin (Rocha 1995), a Swiss-born anthropologist. Later, in 1913, Tamagnini asked for their return which never occurred (Rocha 1995). Despite the teaching and research interest in physical anthropology at Coimbra, the number of human remains from Africa is small. The 10 skulls currently in the collection were brought in the 1920s from Angola (n = 5) and S. Tomé e Principe (n = 5), and the studies performed consisted mainly in very detailed qualitative and quantitative descriptions.

At the University of Oporto, the Museum of Natural History includes collections from the former Anthropological Museum of Oporto (Museu de Antropologia do Porto) established in 1911 by Mendes Correia, its first director (Cunha 2012). Mendes Correia played an important role in the anthropological expeditions (Missões Antropológicas) to colonies (Cunha 2012). The colonial anthropology collection included human remains, mainly skulls,Footnote 1 from around 15 individuals from Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique (Cunha 2010, 2012). There are also four males and one female identified as Satary, killed in a battle in November 1895, and exhumed from the cemeteries of Sanquelim and Cudnem in Goa (Mendes Correia 1916 in Cunha 2010), acquired by Artur Augusto Fonseca Cardoso, treasurer of the SPAE and founder of Colonial Anthropology in Portugal (Mendes Correia 1941; Roque 2010a).

Still at the University of Oporto, the colonial anthropology section of the Anatomical Institute has a group of 29 skulls from Guinea, metrically analysed by Pires de Lima and Mascarenhas (1931) and presented at the XVe Congrès International d’Anthropologie & d’Archéologie Préhistorique – Ie Session de l’Institut International d’Anthropologie, which took place in Coimbra in 1930. The same authors referred to the ethnic composition of the individuals, Arabic-Berber and Black (Negrito), and asked ‘How will it be possible to subordinate these two groups to the same legislation? [...] It is incontestable that the Arab-Berber element has a mentality more developed that the ‘Negrito’ [...] We consider it an urgent need for the State to promote anthropological recognition of indigenous peoples’ as other colonial powers [e.g. France and Britain] had done (Pires de Lima and Mascarenhas 1929). These statements reflect the policies of that time, in which it was important to know the territories and their populations to better govern them.

At the University of Lisbon, the National Museum of Natural History and Science (Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência – Museu Bocage), according to Barbosa Sueiro (1952), housed the skeleton of a Bachope man (Mozambique) who came to Lisbon in 1940 to be exhibited during the Exhibition of the Portuguese World (Exposição do Mundo Português) and who died of tuberculosis during his stay. Manuel Bernardo Barbosa Sueiro (1894–1974) was an anatomist who developed palaeopathological research (Santos and Cunha 2012) so not surprisingly his study included pathological and morphologic variations of the vertebral column and ribs (Barbosa Sueiro 1952). The remains of this individual were probably lost in the fire that destroyed the museum in 1978. Since 2006, this institution has also housed the so-called Silva Teles Collection, moved in 1981 to the Institute of Tropical Scientific Research (IICT – Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical) from its original location in the museum of the Society of Geography of Lisbon (Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa) that had been created in 1875 (Neto 1991). Francisco Xavier Silva Teles (1860–1930) was a naval physician and a geographer, born in Goa and member of the directorate of the Society of Geography of Lisbon. He probably created the collection during his stay in Angola between 1897 and 1899 (Neto 1991). In a letter dated from 1898, Silva Teles wrote that he had begun to collect skulls and this will be ‘the first [African?] collection to appear in Portugal’ (Neto 2003). This collection has been the subject of several studies. Mascarenhas (1934: 209), for example, metrically analysed the 116 skulls to ‘investigate their probable ethnic origin and to frame racial types’. More recently, studies have been done specifically on ancestry, from the perspective of forensic anthropology (Tavares 2008). In 2016, the Museu Bocage received, from the extinct IICT, three male skeletons (with age and cause of death recorded, one with possible ablation of the incisors) recovered during anthropological expeditions to Mozambique (Missão Antropológica a Moçambique) undertaken between the 1930s and 1950s (Santos 2004).

Dental ‘mutilations’ (including both dental modification and wear) was a topic of research in skulls of the museum collections and in the ‘indigenous of our overseas provinces, displayed in this beautiful exhibition at the Palácio de Cristal’ in Oporto (Monteiro and Adrião 1934: 238). In the study of the teeth from the Guineans that were exhibited (18 male and 2 female Balantas, 2 Bijagos and 1 Manjaca), it is mentioned that the 26-year-old Manjaca had ‘maxillary incisors very sharp [...] as he is already civilized, he is ashamed. We could only see his teeth, after Prince Abdullah Sissé [from Guinea] had made a great speech to convince him. Now he wants to remove his incisors and replace them with a dental prosthesis, as many of his fellow countrymen have done lately’. Four of the 38 persons from Mozambique also had dental modifications. The techniques applied were described: amongst the Balantas the modification is made by persons different from those who treat dental problems and occurred ‘without pain or bloodshed’ (Monteiro and Adrião 1934: 242). This study included other cultural aspects learned from the individuals present at the exhibition, and worldwide examples, both from archaeological and living populations, and the possible origin of dental modifications were discussed.

In addition to these individuals/collections, former students of anthropology, like the military officer Artur Augusto Fonseca Cardoso, ‘never stopped measuring skulls, here and beyond sea […] in his officer’s baggage, wherever he went, he never failed to carry the trousse of the anthropologist’ (Fortes 1913: 202). He served in India, Angola and Timor where he also conducted anthropometric studies amongst living populations (Athayde 1934; Fortes 1913). In Angola, Lemos metrically analysed 54 skulls from Humbe and Cuamato (Barros e Cunha and Lemos 1931). According to these authors, these skulls were supposed to be sent to Portugal but were lost during the war.

In addition to the collections from the former colonies, there are in Portugal human remains from other regions. As example, the Natural History Museum at the University of Oporto received specimens from Argentina (donated by Professor Lehmann-Nitsche, from the University of Buenos Aires), Brazil (donated in 1929) and Burkina Faso, designated as Foreign Anthropology (Cunha 2010, 2012). In the storerooms of the University of Coimbra (Department of Life Sciences), there are four skulls from France and Italy and two from Spain.

This synthesis is not a complete and systematic review of all the human remains in Portugal that were brought from the overseas.Footnote 2 Hopefully, it will give an overview of the collections, their origin and context as well as the underlying aims of those studies. Nonetheless, it allows us to estimate that the remains of at least 230 individuals arrived from the Portuguese former colonies, consisting the largest groups of 116 skulls from Angola (University of Lisbon), 35 skulls from Timor (University of Coimbra) and the single donation of 29 skulls from Guinea (University of Oporto).

It is noteworthy that for many decades studies in Portugal, just as elsewhere, aimed to quantify the difference between populations. These times of racial discrimination and colonialism seem very distant in face of the developments occurring in the last decades. However, despite a UNESCO declaration in 1978 stating that there are no races in humankind, this is not globally recognized. Hopefully, the memory of the past will help societies to be more inclusive and tolerant.

Excavations of Human Remains

Archaeological work in Portugal started with researchers who belonged to the Commission for Geological Works (Comissão de Trabalhos Geológicos) which was founded in 1857 (Leite de Vasconcelos 1933) and later by the Geological Services of Portugal (Serviços Geológicos de Portugal), established in 1918 (Raposo and Silva 1996; Fabião 1999; Umbelino and Santos 2011).

To sum up the prodigious advances in knowledge in the nineteenth century, it must be remembered that Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published The Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871. In the century of Positivism, the existence of human fossils in Europe and Asia/Oceania (Java) was recognized. The coexistence of ancient humans and extinct faunas began to be accepted by researchers, and the emergence of our species was placed in previously inconceivable chronological frameworks. Scientific research was intensified all over the world, resulting in an increase in the number of publications, both journals and books (which were widely circulated), scientific meetings and the foundation of professional associations.

This scientific environment framed the beginning of the archaeological exploration of the Portuguese landscape and the emergence of prehistoric studies. Moreover, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a movement of intellectuals called the ‘Generation of the 70s’ (Geração de 70) promoted national ‘regeneration’ and the modernization of the country. In the words of Leal (2006), anthropology started in Portugal as an anthropology of nation-building. This nationalist rhetoric was concerned to prove the ‘unity” and the ‘antiquity’ of the Portuguese ‘nation’ or ‘race’, terms used interchangeably at this period (Santos 2012: S35).

It was in this fervour for evidence of ancient fossils that ‘Tertiary Man’ able to produced carved flints (eólitos) from Ota (see Roque 2010b; Umbelino and Santos 2011) was named by Mortillet, the French archaeologist and anthropologist, as Homosimius ribeiroi (Mendes Correia 1915), a homage to Carlos Ribeiro, one of its most committed defenders. The need to discuss the interpretations of this prehistoric site as well as other findings that were discovered in the country (e.g. the shell midden of Muge, Citânia de Briteiros, caves with human occupation, amongst others) with their international peers led to the organization of the IXe Congrès International d’Anthropologie & d’Archéologie Préhistorique in Lisbon in 1880 with the proceedings published in 1884 (Compte rendu de la 9ème session du Congrès International d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistorique). This was a major event in the development of the discipline in Portugal. In the words of Mendes Correia (1941:8), this scientific meeting ‘brought the attention of all educated Portuguese to anthropological issues’.

One of the hottest themes debated was the origin of the ancestors of the Portuguese – the Lusitanians – with Francisco Martins Sarmento (1833–1899), a pioneer archaeologist with a paleoethnological orientation, being a major proponent of this idea (Fabião 1999). The hypothesis of the eastern cradle of humanity, in the Caucasus region, was proposed by some researchers and repeatedly and sarcastically rejected by others such as Estácio da Veiga (1891). At that time, craniometric morphological analysis prevailed, with a strong influence from French anthropology. Several studies in Portugal confirmed the existence of inhabitants, both in the past and in living populations, who were either dolicho or brachycephalic. Brachycephaly was considered an ancient characteristic in opposition to the more civilized dolichocephalic individuals (Mendes Correia 1918). In the words of Estácio da Veiga (1887), it does make sense to speak of brachycephaly coming from the Indo-European peoples from Asia, and his explanation goes further ‘the superiority or inferiority of a race or an individual could not be deduced from the cranial capacity or from the cephalic index’. In accordance with the Romantic School, he declared that the achievements of the Portuguese were not in line with weak aptitudes revealed by the indices; ‘the calliper does not measure the index of this heroic people’ (Estácio da Veiga 1887).

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of systematic excavations in Portugal, both cultural materials and human remains were studied in an integrated way between archaeologists and anthropologists. The Portuguese Ethnographic Museum (Museu Ethnográfico Português), later Ethnological Museum (Museu Ethnológico), nowadays National Museum of Archaeology (Museu Nacional de Arqueologia), was founded to represent the ‘Portuguese people’. Its founder was José Leite de Vasconcelos (1858–1941), a prominent archaeologist and ethnographer (Fabião 1999, 2008). This integrated perspective was lost during much of the twentieth century with many archaeologists neglecting the importance of the human remains as source of information about the populations who shaped the metals and the ceramics and built the architectural structures.

Physical Anthropology in Portugal Since the 1990s

In the years immediately after the 1974 Revolution, studies/scholars associated with the old and colonial regime were excluded, and the relevant educational and cultural institutions were managed temporarily by left-wing students (Viegas and Pina-Cabral 2014) and workers committees. In the following years, the African colonies became independent countries, and the allusion to overseas (Ultramarino) or to colony was deleted from the name of the institutions, for example, the Institute of Social and Ultramarine Political Sciences (Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas Ultramarinas) became Institute of Social and Political Sciences, and the Museum of Ultramarine Ethnology (Museu de Etnologia do Ultramar) was recalled National Museum of Ethnology (Areia 1986).

In the early 1980s, Portuguese universities were restructured and started to adopt international academic practice (Areia 1986; Viegas and Pina-Cabral 2014). In terms of physical anthropology , the beginning of the 1990s witnessed the rebirth of the field. In the previous decades, there had been a reduction in teaching due to the lack of professors who developed research in human remains, namely, at the University of Coimbra (Areia and Rocha 1985; Cunha 2002; Umbelino and Santos 2011). However, this trend changed, thanks to the vision of Manuel Laranjeira Rodrigues de Areia (who finished his PhD in 1980 in cultural anthropology), Maria Augusta Rocha and others, responsible for the creation in 1992 of the degree in anthropology. This course differed from the others existing in the country because of the balance between the number of disciplines in biological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology (Umbelino and Santos 2011). Teaching, and research, in biological anthropology occurs also at the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas (Lisbon) since the creation of the degree in anthropology in 1968. More recently, the degree in anthropology at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (NOVA) started to integrate in the curriculum disciplines of biological anthropology, while ISCTE (Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa) maintains exclusively the teaching of sociocultural anthropology.

Many of the new graduates in anthropology, as well as many biologists and archaeologists, extended their knowledge of human remains by attending the Masters in Human Evolution created in 1998 (since 2007 called Master in Evolution and Human Biology) at the University of Coimbra, with an important role in the creation of this programme played by Eugénia Cunha, who finished her PhD in 1994 with a study of mediaeval populations of the north of Portugal. The absence of senior professors in Portugal to supervise doctoral thesis was remedied by foreign supervisors (e.g. France, the United Kingdom, Spain) , with a few PhD dissertations undertaken abroad.

The body of knowledge about past populations has been increased since 1999 by the Regulation of Archaeological Works (Diário da República 1999, 2000, 2014), which insists on the mandatory presence of a specialist in physical anthropology in any excavation with human bones. The Directorate-General for Cultural Heritage (DGPC) (Direção Geral do Património Cultural) ‘is responsible for managing the cultural heritage in mainland Portugal’, including the authorization of excavations (the methodologies proposed and subsequently can inspect the works) that occur mostly due to the need to renovate the interior and/or exterior of churches or of former monasteries/convents or as a result of public and private constructions that uncover ancient burial places. After the conclusion of an excavation, the DGPC receives and evaluates the reports from the field projects. The analysis of human remains recovered, which is mostly done in the contest of master and PhD theses, is also recommended.

This law also had as a consequence the (re)integration of the results of human bone analysis in the archaeological interpretations of the sites. In 1999, at the 3rd Congress of Peninsular Archaeology (3° Congresso de Arqueologia Peninsular) held in Vila Real, at the University of Trás-os-Montes, there was a session entitled Interpretation of human skeletons in an archaeological context organized by Eugénia Cunha and Francisco Etxeberria from Spain. After this meeting, the presence of bioanthropologists became more and more common in archaeology and history meetings.

The systematic collection of human remains from contemporaneous cemeteries persists to the present. Although biographical data exist, the name of these individuals is never published for ethical reasons. To replace the lost ‘Ferraz Macedo Collection’, the University of Lisbon started a new collection in the 1980s, now with over 1800 skeletons (Cardoso 2006a, b; Cardoso and Marinho 2015/2016). The University of Évora began an identified collection in the 1990s. In 2007, the University of Coimbra created the so-called twenty-first century identified collection, with skeletons exhumed from the Cemetery of Capuchos in Santarém (Ferreira et al. 2014). This was justified by the need of reference individuals who lived and died more recently. In 2011, the University of Oporto, with the Northern Delegation of the National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences, started a new identified collection within the BoneMedLeg project with individuals from the Cemetery of Agramonte in Oporto (Cardoso and Marinho 2015/2016). These collections have been used by local and foreign researchers to develop methodologies for sex, stature and age-at-death estimation, palaeopathological diagnosis and forensic identification. At the University of Coimbra, staff members and students benefit from presentations given by those visiting researchers.

The current research can be placed in the bioarchaeological tradition. However, this designation is not frequently adopted probably due to historical reasons. In Portugal, the teaching of anthropology arose in the context of natural history (sciences), while archaeology diverged from history (humanities). On the other hand, physical anthropology, or biological anthropology (a more recent formulation that intends to show that craniometry is no longer the aim of the investigations), had to assert itself as a disciplinary area in a country where for many anthropologists, anthropology is synonymous with the sociocultural approach. On a positive note, recently the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (Associação Portuguesa de Antropologia) began to integrate bioanthropologists more actively and the Centre for Research Anthropology (CRIA, Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia), houses at NOVA, the new Laboratory of Biological Anthropology and Ostelogical Human Remains.

In the last few decades, interdisciplinary and internationality have been key factors in the study of human remains, namely, at the group of Past Cultures and Populations from the Research Centre for Anthropology and Health (CIAS, Centro de Investigação em Antropologia e Saúde), where some research projects involve foreign researchers and/or human remains from other countries (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Spain, the United Kingdom, amongst many others) .

Investigations explore topics like mortuary practices, biodistance, mobility, dental nonmetric traits, paleodiets, osteobiographies and population-based studies, including palaeopathological analysis of individuals from prehistoric sites to contemporaneous populations. In these studies, updated techniques are applied (e.g. imaging and microscopy, isotopic analysis or aDNA), and the interpretations tend to follow a biocultural approach. I believe that the discipline has a great future based on a past of more than 150 years.