Setúbal-Melides Bronze Age Voices

Across the sandy headlands and sheltered bays of southwestern Iberia, communities of the Middle Bronze Age (Portugal_MBA) left subtle marks: hearths, pottery scatters and ephemeral burial traces dated between 1800 and 1300 BCE. Archaeological data indicates these occupations built on long regional traditions — Neolithic farming, Chalcolithic metalwork and coastal exchange networks — while adapting to shifting climates and mobility patterns.

The five sampled individuals come from multiple sites in Setúbal district and nearby coastal plain: Casas Velhas, Melides; Monte do Gato de Cima 3; Torre Velha 3; and Monte do Vale do Ouro 2. Radiocarbon contexts and pottery styles place these remains squarely in the Middle Bronze Age horizon, a period of increasing social complexity in Portugal when metallurgy and long-distance connections intensified.

Limited evidence suggests the Portugal_MBA communities were regionally rooted but receptive to outside influences. Material culture shows affinities across Iberia, while local landscape use — seasonal grazing, coastal foraging and small-scale agriculture — continued. The genetic snapshots described below offer a complementary thread, allowing us to trace ancestral lineages through both material remains and DNA, and to see how individuals at these sites were part of broader demographic currents sweeping Bronze Age Europe.

The Portugal_MBA genetic dataset is small (N = 5) and should be read as a set of preliminary windows into regional ancestry rather than a definitive population portrait. Uniparental markers show a pattern of male-line homogeneity alongside more diverse maternal lineages. Three of five male-line calls are assigned to haplogroup R. While the dataset does not resolve subclades, the presence of R-dominated Y-DNA is consistent with broader Bronze Age patterns in western Europe where R-lineages become common.

Mitochondrial diversity among the five individuals includes haplogroups U (two individuals, one specified as U5b), H (one) and X (one). U5b is often linked to deeper Mesolithic European maternal ancestry, whereas haplogroup H became widespread in later Neolithic and Bronze Age maternal pools; haplogroup X is less frequent but appears sporadically across prehistoric Europe. This mix suggests maternal inputs from long-standing local lineages alongside lineages that circulated during Neolithic and Bronze Age periods.

Given the low sample count (<10), any autosomal inferences would be highly tentative. Nevertheless, the combination of common R Y-lineages and varied mtDNA fits a model where male-mediated expansion or continuity coexists with diverse maternal ancestries — a pattern seen in many Bronze Age contexts. Future sampling and genome-wide data are required to test hypotheses about migration, social structure and sex-biased mobility in Middle Bronze Age Portugal.