Ricardo Severo, son of José António de Fonseca e Costa and Mariana da Cruz de Fonseca e Costa, was born on 6 November into a family that became wealthy as a result of his father’s commercial business interests in Angola, where he was a supplier for military caravans and expeditions.

During his childhood, the family moved to Porto and he did his high school studies at the Porto Academic School [Escola Académica do Porto] where two of his classmates were Rocha Peixoto and Basílio Teles. His interest in the study of the ethnic roots of the Portuguese people grew when he came into contact with the archaeological work of Carlos Ribeiro, which led to his attending the IX Congresso Internacional de Arqueologia e de Antropologia Pré-Históricas [9th International Congress of Prehistoric Archaeology and Anthropology] in Lisbon in 1880.

In the academic year 1884-85 he enrolled in the Civil Engineering course at the Porto Polytechnic Academy [Academia Politécnica do Porto] where he was an outstanding student, twice winning the prize for best student of his course. He earned his diploma as a civil engineer first for Public Works (November, 1890) and later for Mining (March, 1891). At the Polytechnic Academy a positivist conception of Science dominated, with a teaching model that was markedly scientific-technical and focused on the field of the natural and exact sciences. This influenced the direction in which his scientific thought took him.

His student phase figures as a period of extremely intense scientific labour in the areas of Archaeology, Prehistory and Ethnology, all of which greatly attracted him. He was by nature very dynamic and developed projects and initiatives that gained the support of those he knew, ranging from fellow students, college teachers and old friends to well-known personalities in cultural and scientific circles. In 1886 he published his first scientific article, written in collaboration with Fonseca Cardoso and with supplementary comments by Martins de Sarmento, in the Revista de Guimarães on the subject of an archaeological dig in the ‘Cividade de Bagunte’, the site of a fortified Iron Age settlement that he knew well and which he had explored during his visits to a family property nearby. Then in 1888, while still only 19 years old, he published his first individual work, Paleoethnologia portugueza, a critical essay on the famous French archaeologist Émile Cartailhac’s work on Iberian Prehistory. In this essay he did not shy away from adding further data of his own that he had been compiling from his own archaeological observations and surveys in the northern part of the country, and he highlighted new aspects and unpublished curiosities about megalithic culture and prehistoric materials.

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