In the last few decades, the discovery of large ditched enclosures in Iberia has revealed the diversity and complexity of deposition and manipulation of human bone remains. Alongside traditional ritual burials (mainly megalithic tombs and hypogea), fragmented and scattered human bones mixed with other kinds of material culture began to appear in many features. This is the case for Ditch 5 at Marroquíes, which offers an excellent opportunity to explore this ritual behaviour. Based on a multi-proxy approach, three main conclusions can be drawn: 1) the skeletal elements present show deliberate selection of particular categories of bones; 2) depositional episodes included the remains of people who died at different points in time and were subject to different taphonomic processes, and 3) mobility patterns indicate that all individuals, with one possible exception, were local. The movement and manipulations of body parts may reflect the active role of people after death as social and symbolic elements that retain agency and capacity for action.

Neolithic ditched enclosures appear to be widely distributed across Central and Western Europe, and from the Mediterranean area to Scandinavia. They have been known in areas of Europe for a long time, but particularly in the last 25 years studies on British, French, Central European, and Scandinavian ditched enclosures have flourished. In line with this, a number of international meetings occurred in the last three decades. In southern Iberia, by contrast, ditched enclosures only began to be known in the 1970s, and even then methodological deficiencies and lack of funding hampered their characterisation. As a consequence of this, Iberian Neolithic and Copper Age ditched enclosures were largely unknown outside Portugal and Spain. They were not represented in any of the international meetings above, nor included in any of the syntheses made about the topic. Not only that, for decades, Spanish and Portuguese archaeologists were not aware of the potential analogies themselves, and the research that was being carried out elsewhere in Europe had almost no influence on the way ditched enclosures were surveyed, excavated, and interpreted in the peninsula. The main objective of this article is to advance the recognition of the southern Iberian evidence by other European researchers and the integration of the Iberian conversation into the general discussion. The focus will be on how these sites have been studied by several generations of Iberian archaeologists, in an attempt to explain why it has taken Portuguese and Spanish archaeologists so long to realise that Iberian enclosures should not be understood in isolation.