Integrated Researcher . PhD student at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, NOVA University
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Maria Antónia de Castro Athayde Amaral was born on 8 February 1964 in the city of Porto. She is enrolled in the Doctoral Programme in Archaeology (2023/2024), specialising in the Archaeology of Architecture and Construction, at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa, having defended her Final Course Project in Archaeology on 24 May 2025. She holds a degree in History (Archaeology branch), and postgraduate diplomas in Cultural Affairs within Local Government (1989–1991) and in Roman Archaeology (1989–1991) from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Coimbra. She has worked at the Public Institute for Cultural Heritage since 1991, having begun her duties in the Inventory Commission for Heritage of the Ministry of Culture, as a curator for the Grão Vasco National Museum, the Lamego Museum, and the Machado de Castro Museum. She has worked at the Regional Directorate of IPPAR in Coimbra, at Igespar in Lisbon, and at the Regional Directorate for Lisbon and the Tagus Valley, where she served as Director of the Department of Cultural Assets. Between 2019 and 2023, she held the position of Director of the Castle of S. Jorge in Lisbon, where she promoted studies and launched an editorial line dedicated to the monument. In the context of her professional duties, she carried out several excavations in Portuguese castles (Marialva, Pinhel, Almeida, and Alcanede) and in several medieval monasteries, such as Santa Maria de Aguiar and Santa Clara of Santarém. She represents the supervising authority in the enhancement projects for the battlefields of the Batalha de Aljubarrota Foundation, serving as the scientific director of the archaeological works carried out on the Aljubarrota battlefield, in Porto de Mós, and on the S. Marcos battlefield, in Trancoso. Between 2019 and 2024, she directed the archaeological works on the tombs of King Dinis and the Infante in Odivelas, and she is currently finalising the submission of the final archaeological reports and preparing a publication on the intervention, to be released in 2026 by Património Cultural, IP. Between 2020 and 2024, she was also a External Member of the General Council of the University of Coimbra. Since 2024, she has held the position of Head of the Division of Cadastre, Inventory, and Classification at Património Cultural, IP, where she is also responsible for the Archaeology Library and the Sacavém Fort. She has published articles on these interventions in the proceedings of the Congreso Los orígenes de la expansión europea (2015), the 2nd Congress of the Association of Portuguese Archaeologists (2017), the Beira Alta journal (2016), and the proceedings of the 6th Luso-Spanish Conference “War and Society in the Middle Ages,” of the Spanish Society for Medieval Studies (2008).
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