The Pedra Formosa, "the beautiful stone", is a slab of carved granite 2.90 metres wide from the Iron Age hill town of Citânia de Briteiros in northern Portugal, with a half-round notch in its foot just wide enough for a person. In 1718 eleven teams of oxen dragged it down to the churchyard of Santo Estêvão de Briteiros; local legend said a Moorish woman had carried it on her head while she spun. In 1876 the archaeologist Francisco Martins Sarmento had it hauled back up the hill by twenty-four teams, and in 1897 it went to the museum in Guimarães that bears his name, where it was laid flat on four posts.

In September 1930, men building a road on the same hill struck a second stone, still standing inside a buried building with a furnace, a covered room and a court with a water tank. The workmen went through the opening on hands and knees of their own accord, and the excavator, Mário Cardoso, noted it. The accepted reading was a tomb. Cardoso argued for a crematorium.

Strabo had written of the peoples by the Douro, two thousand years earlier, that they took "baths in vapours that rise from heated stones", and then bathed in cold water. Today most archaeologists read these buildings as steam baths, and the beautiful stone as the door of the hot room.

What will they make of our saunas in two thousand years?

Sources: Mário Cardoso, "A Pedra Formosa", Revista de Guimarães 38 (1928), and "A última descoberta arqueológica na Citânia de Briteiros e a interpretação da «Pedra Formosa»", Revista de Guimarães 41 (1931) and 42 (1932), read at Casa de Sarmento, University of Minho; Strabo, Geography III.3.6 (Loeb translation). The bath reading is the majority view, not a unanimous one. The drawings are ours, after Cardoso's figures.
Sounds: Freesound (CC0): kyles, felix.blume, ohmgvideo, craigsmith, sarena6487528, NistuGgner, qubodup, falcospizaetus, black_trillium, LiezelDippenaar, Nickh69, Gnarlycuga, supaluci, mohomran, bowlingballout, mcmikai, tonalt, SukritSen, TRP, indirect, vero.marengere, njjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj, spookymodem, nicotep, marc.om, f3bbbo, MorenaLuz, zazz.sound.design; Mökkiperikunnalle sounds (CC0).