Interpreting archaeological continuities: an approach to transversal equality in the Argaric Bronze Age of south-east Iberia

Abstract

As archaeologists, we seek to understand how the people of the past we study lived and interacted. In approaching this complex enterprise it has been fundamental to discern to what extent social equality and inequality were present among them. In the case of the Bronze Age communities I will present here, mainstream research has interpreted a selected range of perceived discontinuities in material culture as evidence of the presence of unequal social groups of equals and, additionally, has usually considered equality and inequality as exclusive categories. This paper will attempt to demonstrate that this is not always the case, using examples from the Argaric Bronze Age of Iberia. Here, and despite the evident existence of a general social inequality, a closer look at women's material culture allows us to interpret continuities in the funerary record as signs of a social transversal equality.