The Martins Samento Museum is to be found near to the centre of Guimardes town on the Rua Dr A. Pimenta, housed in the former convent of Sao Domingo. It was named after the man who made his life work the excavation of the Celtic settlement at Citcinia de Briteiros. The facade has unusual semicircular alcoves and the three words ‘Archaeology, Ekthnography, and History’ above the doorway. The place gets relatively few visitors even in high season so often there is a personalised tour by one of the university students who earn some extra money working in the museum over the summer.
The exhibits have been collected from the Roman settlement at Braga, and the Celtic sites at Citanio de Briteiros and nearby Azores Islands. As well as practical items, such as arrowheads and coins, one piece of sculpture stands out among the exhibits from Briteiros. This is a delicately carved cart pulled at both ends by oxen and men carrying tools. There is also a model of the controversial ‘funerary tomb’ that can still be seen at Briteiros and in the cloister below is a large stone slab believed to have been used to seal the entrance to this tomb, known as a pedro formoso. The tomb is believed to have been communal and after cremation the ashes of each individual would be put in a sarcophagus and pushed through the small entrance at the foot of the stone. An example of such a sarcophagus is exhibited near to the stone. Martins Sarmento believed the pedro formoso to have been a slab on which sacrifices were carried out, while others believe it and the ‘funerary tomb’ to have been some kind of primitive sauna.
Engraved on several of the Celtic stones are stars. Stars of three points are believed to have represented the sun god and stars of five points the weather god. Axes and tools have also been carved on some of the tombs, representing the work of the person interred.
Interesting insights into Roman culture are also to be gained here. For example, models show how they constructed their roofs and how the builders would carve into the stone an animal’s paw, such as those of a sheep or a cat, as a means of identifying themselves as the builder. The tiny tear-shaped glasses in the display cases were used to collect a person’s tears prior to their death or emigration and were given as a gift and memento to friends or family. Other of the tiny glass vessels were used to keep juices from flowers to use as a perfume after a visit to the baths. They were, apparently, used much more often by men than by women.
In the cloister below there is a very large Roman standing stone carved with pictures of a young girl and an old woman. This was from a young girl to her grandmother, in effect, a kind of greetings gift. The museum’s most striking exhibit, however, and probably its most valuable, sits in the small garden just next to the cloister. This is the Collosus, a prehistoric figure dating from around 910 B.C., which stands around 41 metres high and is remarkably full of life despite its curious shape. Discovered at the Briteiros site in 1930 it took twenty-four pairs of oxen to drag it to the museum.
This is an appropriate point at which to leave a museum that gives one a great sense of the prehistory of the Portuguese state, and to visit the other fine museum in Guimardes, that was originally a monastery, intimately involved in the setting up of the new state. The first construction on the Alberto Sampaio Museum site was a tenth-century Benedictine monastery, ordered to be built by Mumadona, a local noblewoman.
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