EL ARGAR AND RELATED BRONZE AGE CULTURES OF THE IBERIAN PENINSULA

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Sardinia's Bronze Age Towers . . . . . . . . . . 50

The Bronze Age of the southeastern quadrant of the Iberian Peninsula constitutes an archaeologically well-documented example of the barbarian social formations of later prehistoric Europe. The rich body of mortuary evidence first developed in the late nineteenth century by the Belgian mining engineers Henri Siret and Louis Siret has been supplemented by a number of settlement excavations that have taken place since the 1970s. As a result, one can reconstruct the major lines of the economic and social organization of southeastern Iberia in the late third millennium and early second millennium b.c. Radiocarbon dates for the classic Bronze Age cultures of southeastern Iberia generally fall between about 2200 to 1500 b.c. There are three regional variants: the El Argar culture of eastern Andalusia and Murcia, the Bronce Valenciano of the Spanish Levant and southern Aragon, and the Mancha Bronze Age of the southern Meseta. Of these, the Argaric is the best known.

el argar

The bulk of the evidence for the El Argar complex comes from coastal lowlands of the provinces of Almería and Murcia. The Siret brothers' mining operations were based in this region, and the most important modern excavations, at Gatas and Fuente Álamo, have been carried out at sites first excavated by the Sirets. The coastal zone of southeastern Spain lies in the rain shadow of the Betic mountain systems (the Sierra Nevada, the Sierra de Segura, and so forth). In the present, this is the most arid region of Europe, with mean annual rainfall of less than 400 millimeters, so that irrigation is a prerequisite for stable agriculture. The El Argar culture area extends westward into the uplands of eastern Andalusia, windward of the mountain systems, where higher precipitation permits reliably productive dry farming. The available paleoenvironmental evidence indicates that the climate during the Bronze Age was similar to that of the present. The modern environmental contrasts within the area are caused by the mountainous geography and would have been diminished during the Bronze Age only by changes in atmospheric circulation patterns greater than can be plausibly postulated for the Holocene period.

Settlement. The Bronze Age archaeology of southeastern Iberia is an archaeology of settlements. Hundreds of Argaric villages are documented: in areas that have been surveyed systematically they are found every 2 or 3 kilometers along the watercourses. The villages typically consist of tight clusters


of rectangular houses packed on the crests of steep hills and terraced on the upper slopes of the hillsides. Almost all of these sites are small (a fraction of a hectare), limited in size by their emplacements, but they are often deeply stratified, reflecting long occupations that cover much of the seven hundred–year span of the Argaric Bronze Age. A few sites, Cerro de la Virgen, for example, were occupied in the preceding Copper Age, but most were newly established in the Bronze Age. Argaric settlement strategies were apparently governed by defensive considerations of unprecedented severity.

Production. The long-term occupations characteristic of the Argaric were based on stably productive mixed farming. The staple grains were wheat and barley, supplemented by legumes, such as peas, broad beans, and lentils. Animal species included (in descending order of frequency) sheep and goats, cattle, pigs, and horses. A variety of intensifications of agricultural production had been initiated in the preceding Copper Age, and these were maintained in the Argaric. The evidence indicates the exploitation of sheep, goats, cattle, and horses for their secondary products (wool, milk, traction). There may have been some cultivation of olives. It also seems likely that there was some development of hydraulic agriculture: throughout the Argaric culture area, sites are oriented toward land that could be irrigated, and in the arid sector the cultivation of crops, such as flax and broad beans, would have required irrigation.

Argaric households engaged in a complete suite of production activities, none of them exhibiting a significant degree of craft specialization. The ceramic industry generally exhibits a low degree of artisan investment. Vessels were coil-made and generally coarsely tempered pottery that was fired at low temperatures under reducing conditions. Ceramic decoration is generally rare except for digitations (finger impressions) on the rims and appliqué buttons. The range of forms (carinated vases, bowls, baggy storage jars of various sizes) is monotonous and repetitive but not apparently standardized. The fragments of linen and woolen textiles that have been recovered are homespun, and loom weights are found in most domestic spaces. Esparto grass was used to make baskets and cords. The chipped-stone tool industry consists mainly of unmodified blades and flakes, the main distinctive tool type being backed and denticulated sickle teeth. Typologically nondescript milling stones and groundstone axes were also produced. Even metallurgy appears to be a household industry. Arsenical copper ores were smelted in small ceramic crucibles found in otherwise ordinary-seeming domestic contexts; the overall number of artifacts produced was very small (particularly in comparison to other regions of Europe at the same time), and the trace-element signatures of slags and finished artifacts varied from site to site (suggesting that the circulation and recasting of metal was minimal). Metallurgical production was devoted primarily to making arms (daggers, halberds, swords, projectile points) and ornaments (such as bracelets) to be interred with the dead. Tools such as chisels were produced in smaller quantities.

Social and Political Organization. The Argarics buried their dead under the floors of their houses in natural cavities, stone cists, or large jars. These were individual interments, but in some cases there were double (male and female) burials. Radiocarbon dates on the skeletons of a series of five of these double burials indicate that in all cases the female skeleton was a century or more older than the male, suggesting a matrilocal residence pattern. Argaric grave goods consist of the personal finery of the dead, such as ceramic drinking vessels and bronze weapons and ornaments, and they show considerable differences in wealth. These wealth differentials are more marked at sites in the arid sector of the Argaric culture area and have generally been interpreted as evidence of hereditary stratification, but analyses of the skeletal evidence provide no clear evidence that individuals with wealthier grave goods grew taller or were healthier in childhood.

Systematic, extensive excavations of Argaric villages are still few, but the results from the most completely published sites—El Picacho, Gatas, Peñalosa, and Fuente Álamo—do not suggest marked internal differentiation in residential facilities. Some houses are bigger than others to be sure, but there is no prima facie evidence for chiefly residences. It is of particular interest, for example, that no claims have been made for the association of wealthier burials with larger residences. Likewise, there is little monumentality in public architecture. Large public spaces or plazas are not evident (if only because the packing of the houses onto hilltops would have made these difficult to establish). The only buildings interpretable as public or official buildings—the freestanding rectangular structures H and O, built during phases III and IV of the Fuente Álamo occupation—are both relatively modest in size (about 50 meters squared and 80 meters squared, respectively).

Argaric settlements show some differentiation in size. Robert Chapman interprets this as evidence of a two-tier settlement hierarchy, which in turn would suggest a chiefdom level of social organization. Roberto Risch suggests that at Fuente Álamo large-scale grain milling was out of proportion to the agricultural resources found in the immediate vicinity and infers from this that its residents must have received grain from lower-ranking communities elsewhere. Similar claims have been made on the basis of as yet incompletely published survey projects. The difficulty with such claims is the limited scale of differentiation involved. The range of site sizes is from villages of at most 6 or 7 hectares (not necessarily occupied simultaneously) to hamlets of a fraction of a hectare. This is not what one would expect of a society with a well-established social hierarchy.

The general consensus of students of the Argaric has been that it was a culture that showed signs of "emerging complexity" (this term serves as the title for Chapman's study). Most scholars feel that it was certainly a chiefdom and even perhaps a state. The evidence accumulated by the functionalist archaeology of the past generation to test this view suggests a more "tribal" form of social organization, however. Households were self-sufficient and undifferentiated in their production. The multiplicity of small settlements found throughout the Argaric zone suggests that small groups of households enjoyed the freedom to establish themselves in new communities. Considerable wealth differentials may have arisen in the context of the competition over the resources, including herds and irrigated plots. These differentials might have become more pronounced in the course of agricultural intensification. They appear to be larger in the arid zone (where environmental constraints would have sharpened such competition), but there is little to suggest that commoners were caged by powerful aristocrats.

Ideology. The burial of the dead under the houses of the living strongly suggests the existence of clan ideologies that legitimated household property claims in terms of ancestry. Apart from the mortuary record, Argaric archaeology is conspicuously lacking in direct evidence of systems of beliefs. There is no art; there are no figurines or other nonfunctional objects interpretable as fetishes; there are no evident cult spaces, apart from a possible altar from the site of El Oficio. This is in sharp contrast to the abundant evidence of religious practice that characterized the communal institutions of the preceding Copper Age and the civic ones of the succeeding Iron Age.

the bronce valenciano and the mancha bronze age

The Bronce Valenciano and the Mancha Bronze Age cultures are broadly contemporaneous to the Argaric and grade into it seamlessly along their "frontier" in northern Jaén and Murcia Provinces. They are differentiated from the Argaric (and from each other) more to facilitate didactic archaeological classification than because of differences in their principal features. The main substantive contrast, in fact, is the scarcity of burials inside the settlements.

The Bronce Valenciano is distributed in the mountainous zone and coastal areas of eastern Spain between the Rivers Ebro and Segura, an area whose climate and resources are broadly similar to the less-arid portions of the Argaric domain. The Mancha Bronze Age is found in the southeastern Meseta north of the Sierra Morena and Betic mountain systems. This region has a more arid and Continental climate than the Spanish Levant, but conditions are in no way as unfavorable to agriculture as in the coastal Argaric zone.

Settlement. Both the Bronce Valenciano and the Mancha Bronze Age are characterized by their large numbers of small settlements, usually placed on hilltops, promontories, or other defensible positions. In the Alto Palancia district (within the Bronce Valenciano area), for example, 50 open settlements (open-air settlements, as opposed to caves or rock shelters) are documented in an area of a little over 1,000 square kilometers. A survey of 10,000 square kilometers in northern Albacete Province (in the Mancha Bronze Age area) documented the existence of some 250 Bronze Age settlements. Site densities of a similar order of magnitude are found wherever archaeologists have worked systematically. The Mancha Bronze Age is distinguished by the construction of fortified settlements built on a circular plan in areas where the natural relief affords insufficient protection (El Azuer and El Acequión are the best-known examples).

Production. The lack of published, functionally oriented excavations means less is known about the organization of productive activities for the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age than for the Argaric, but the available evidence suggests that subsistence patterns were broadly similar. The same range of domesticates were husbanded, the pattern being one of mixed farming with intensifications, such as the use of the plow and other exploitations of animals for their secondary products. In terms of artifact technology, what mainly distinguishes the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age from the Argaric is the absence of some of the more distinctive Argaric productions, such as ceramic chalices and bronze swords and halberds. In the Argaric, these are only found in burials, and burials are scarce in the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age areas.

Social and Political Organization. The scarcity of mortuary evidence from the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age areas deprives archaeologists of one of the principal avenues for assessing social distinctions. Cerro de la Encantada, in the Mancha Bronze Age area, contains burials, but it is often considered an Argaric outlier because it has as many as twenty burials, which falls far short of the more than one thousand found at El Argar itself. The evidence elsewhere is too sparse to permit assessment of its central tendencies. The Mancha Bronze Age circular fortified settlements are sometimes interpreted as being occupied by elites, and some of them have yielded items that are suggestive of an elite presence (such as the 107-gram ivory button from El Acequión). But systematic testing of this hypothesis would require comparison of the contents of habitational spaces found at these large sites with their counterparts at smaller sites. Our most reliable avenue for assessing social differentiation is restricted to the settlement-pattern evidence obtained in systematic surveys. The multiplicity of small sites and the small size of the larger ones (Cola Caballo, the largest site documented in the area surveyed by Antonio Gilman, Manuel Fernández-Miranda, María Dolores Fernández-Posse, and Concepción Martín, measures 1.4 hectares) argues strongly for a segmentary social organization.

Ideology. José Sánchez Meseguer's interpretation of one of the constructional spaces at Cerro de la Encantada as a cult space, even if accepted, would be an isolated exception to the general absence of overt ideological manifestations in the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age cultures. The overall pattern of absence of overt "superstructural" activities is similar to what is found in the Argaric.

commentary

The rich archaeological record available for the El Argar culture permits one to sketch out its principal features. The makers of that record were largely self-sufficient households of socially segmentary mixed farmers engaged in intense competition over land and other factors of production. In the course of that competition, they developed incipient social ranking. The evidence for the Bronce Valenciano and Mancha Bronze Age cultures is less complete, but it is clearly indicative of social groups operating along similar lines. This reconstruction is very different, however, from those that can be obtained for societies that are historically documented. One cannot tell, for example, what language (or languages) the Bronze Age people of southeastern Iberia spoke. (One might speculate that they spoke an ancestral version of the non-Indo-European Iberian spoken in the same area of the peninsula fifteen hundred years later, but the changes in the artifactual inventory from the Bronze to the Iron Age is so pervasive that tracing a direct archaeological filiation is impossible.) This, in turn, makes any ethnic interpretation of the Iberian Bronze Age a dubious proposition: the archaeological record does not document an ancient society but rather an ancient way of life that may have been shared by groups that would have considered themselves (and would have been considered by contemporary observers) to be quite different. It is important to realize, therefore, that this deep prehistoric case is in some important respects not comparable to ones documented ethnohistorically.

See alsoLate Neolithic/Copper Age Iberia (vol. 1, part 4); Iberia in the Iron Age (vol. 2, part 6); Early Medieval Iberia (vol. 2, part 7).

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Antonio Gilman