Abstract
The great site of Valencina de la Concepción, near Seville in the lower Guadalquivir valley of southwest Spain, is presented in the context of debate about the nature of Copper Age society in southern Iberia as a whole. Many aspects of the layout, use, character and development of Valencina remain unclear, just as there are major unresolved questions about the kind of society represented there and in southern Iberia, from the late fourth to the late third millennium cal BC. This paper discusses 178 radiocarbon dates, from 17 excavated sectors within the c. 450 ha site, making it the best dated in later Iberian prehistory as a whole. Dates are modelled in a Bayesian statistical framework. The resulting formal date estimates provide the basis for both a new epistemological approach to the site and a much more detailed narrative of its development than previously available. Beginning in the 32nd century cal BC, a long-lasting tradition of simple, mainly collective and often successive burial was established at the site. Mud-vaulted tholoi appear to belong to the 29th or 28th centuries cal BC; large stone-vaulted tholoi such as La Pastora appear to date later in the sequence. There is plenty of evidence for a wide range of other activity, but no clear sign of permanent, large-scale residence or public buildings or spaces. Results in general support a model of increasingly competitive but ultimately unstable social relations, through various phases of emergence, social competition, display and hierarchisation, and eventual decline, over a period of c. 900 years.
Highlights
New Questions for Copper Age IberiaIn the last 20–30 years, research into the Iberian Copper Age has experienced a remarkable upheaval
This paper presents formal chronological models for a selection of mortuary and other contexts from Valencina de la Concepcion, blending 30 of the 40 radiocarbon measurements relating to the Copper Age use of the site that have already been published (Garcıa Sanjuan 2013, pp. 26–27; Caceres Puro et al 2014, Table 1) with a total of 138 new ones, obtained as part of a multi-partner collaborative effort
This artificial cave has been shown to have a complex history of use with earlier burials being disturbed during episodes of reuse, but the vertical nature of many of the deposits does lend itself to relative ordering of some deposits and those skeletal remains that were found in articulation
Summary
New Questions for Copper Age IberiaIn the last 20–30 years, research into the Iberian Copper Age has experienced a remarkable upheaval. Numerous new sites have been discovered in the course of development-led fieldwork or through aerial photography, and significant numbers of these have been excavated, substantially augmenting the previously known range of settlements, megalithic tombs and other funerary structures. Some stonewalled sites, such as Castanheiro do Vento, in northern Portugal, have been interpreted as monumentalised spaces with largely ritual or funerary functions, and are labelled ‘walled enclosures’ (Jorge 2003).The extension of the geographical spotlight beyond its previous focus on southeast Spain to include southern Portugal, as well as central and southwest Spain, has led to a reassessment of the nature of social relations in that region (Dıaz-del-Rıo 2011; Ramos Millan 2013). It is clear that there were substantial regional variations in the way Copper Age societies developed in Iberia (Chapman 2008; Balsera Nieto et al 2015)
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