Tomb 80 of La Almoloya (Pliego Murcia). Example of a typical burial from the Argaric Bronze Age. Image © ASOME-UAB. CC BY-ND.
In 2018, research from Harvard University proposed that warrior-like groups originating from Eastern Europe (modern-day Russia and Ukraine) spread across the continent in a wave of violent migrations, starting around 5,000 years ago. These groups are believed to descend from the Yamnaya, a Steppe population.
It was also suggested that 4,500 years ago in southeastern Iberia (present-day Spain), local Copper Age men were either killed or excluded from having children with local women by an invading elite group of Steppe-descended men. However, this ‘invasion theory’ of Iberia has since been criticised. Miguel Valério, is part of a team of archaeologists from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona whose work has challenged this theory…
ScienceVega: What can you tell us about the apparent Iberian ‘invasion’ by Steppe warriors?
MV: First, our project is devoted to a Bronze Age culture from southeast Spain called El Argar, which occupied the territory between 2200-1550 BCE, and it spread from a very small initial core area to an area of around 35,000km2, which is about the size of modern-day Belgium. So, it had a prolonged existence.
This culture is very interesting because the tombs had significant inequalities in terms of economy, politics, and society. This is quite noticeable because the grave goods tell us about three different echelons or social classes of people that did not have the same access to wealth.
Now, we want to see how this social situation was developed within El Argar society because it entailed huge changes regarding the previous period, which was the Chalcolithic, also known as the Copper Age. We are very much interested in the transition between these two time periods because it brought about these important social changes. During the Chalcolithic, for example, tombs were usually collective, so you have many individuals in the same grave. To put it simply, Chalcolithic grave goods weren’t as differentiated, and the graves were built outside the settlements.
When the El Argar society emerges, we start to see the ritual became individual. We mostly have tombs for one person and about 10% of the time we have double tombs, that is, tombs with two individuals. The burials are now found inside the settlements, which are typically situated on hilltop sites and either protected naturally or fortified. They were also placed beneath the houses. These individual tombs reflect a whole different mentality; as I said, the grave goods are very much differentiated by wealth.
One of our interests is to see how this society took shape. Its formative period is between 2200-2000 BCE, but that period is very poorly known for a number of reasons. The typical El Argar site in its initial core geographic area was occupied from the beginning. In such cases we may document three phases. It’s like having three settlements, one on the top of the other. When you excavate, the phase you will know more about is going to be the last one, that is, the most recent.
Archaeological digs not only cost money. Excavating a level means removing it, in a way destroying it. So often we don’t reach the lowest levels of a site. And so, we have less information about these earliest periods. Also, we have very few tombs from the first two hundred years of the El Argar culture.
So, to sum up, our interest was in this poorly known transition period and formative stage of El Argar, which was the main the focus of the paper. We wanted to see what, if any, time lay between the Chalcolithic and the Bronze Age in southeast Spain and to do that, we focused on the radiocarbon dates of the tombs.
The conclusion was that even though the El Argar burial rituals probably emerged after the end of the Chalcolithic ones, we can also say that probably not much time elapsed between one thing and the other. This was the first conclusion of the paper.
The archaeological site of Gatas (Turre, Almería), where one of the oldest known Argaric tombs was found. Image © ASOME-UAB. CC BY-ND.
Following on from that, we thought we could use radiocarbon dates from all these tombs, especially those from the Chalcolithic ones, to do a demographic approach to the problem of the transition between the two periods. By doing that, we saw evidence for a demographic decline starting around 2500-2400 BCE and lasting till 2200 BCE, that is, the two or three hundred years before the El Argar society started.
That led to the question of this violent invasion theory because, although it is not something we work directly on, it affects what we are studying. It is to do with the advances that have been taking place in the last ten years or so in terms of archaeogenetic studies, which point to a huge migration of people from the East. This would have taken place some 5,000 or 4,500 years ago when people from what is today Russia and Ukraine migrated to Central Europe. Eventually people with this genetic component would have reached the British Isles, and modern-day France, Spain and Portugal.
The idea of a violent invasion came from a talk by David Reich a few years ago, in which it was suggested the genetic results were pointing to a sudden invasion of male warriors with Steppe ancestry reaching the Iberian Peninsula and wiping out most of the local population. That was because the local male lineages disappeared from the archaeological record of El Argar, whereas female genetic lineages that existed before the ‘invasion’ were preserved.
This made international news, but there were archaeologists who thought this scenario was a bit of an exaggeration because the archaeological evidence did not support it. A counter press release signed by many colleagues advised we should be more cautious about this idea.
When we did this piece of research, it was telling us that maybe what we were seeing is not really a sudden invasion of male warriors that wiped out local men. For once, from an archaeological point of view, it seems as though things were actually changing slowly, perhaps over the course of many centuries.
For instance, the first dated cases of Steppe ancestry in the Iberian Peninsula are from the northern and central-northern areas, and there is also one in Catalonia to the northeast, from about 2500-2400 BCE. We don’t have yet any individuals with Steppe ancestry in the southeast in the same period.
We find this Steppe component only when El Argar was already well settled, about 500 years later. At this point in time, almost all Argaric men have it. That is of course striking, but we’re talking about centuries of human history in which we don’t know exactly what was going on. In any case, what it doesn’t seem like is a sudden invasion.
When we saw the evidence for demographic decline around this period, we thought that perhaps this is evidence of a different scenario. Maybe what we are seeing is that the Steppe people entered slowly into the Iberian Peninsula and ended up mixing up with the local population, so that two or three hundred years later, we find that most men have this Steppe ancestry. It’s not because there was a violent invasion; it’s simply the result of admixture with the local populations and other social practises that perhaps we are not aware of.
La Almoloya: ASOME-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Image © CC BY-SA 4.0< https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 >, via Wikimedia Commons.
ScienceVega: Is this area in southeast Spain a well-known area of Iberian prehistory?
MV: This area of our culture has been studied for more than a hundred and thirty years, but it is not very well known to the wider public even here in Spain. However, this is changing, in part thanks to some impressive archaeological findings in the last fifteen years. We have been working on it for a while. The idea of the violent invasion becomes an important question because we are very much interested in the social side of things. It’s one thing to say that things changed due to a sudden invasion of male warriors killing all local men and taking the women, but quite another if the circumstances were entirely different. That’s why we were interested in this.
ScienceVega: There were differences in grave sites, from mass graves to individual tombs from the Copper to the Bronze Age, but what other differences have you found?
MV: When we excavate a site from El Argar, we see something completely different from the Late Copper Age. The two sites we are working on right now are good examples: they are called La Bastida and La Almoloya.
La Bastida is located on a conical mountain roughly the size of five football fields, and which lies in what was the initial core area of El Argar. The sites that are in this core territory were occupied from the beginning and, in the case of La Bastida, you clearly see the three phases of the El Argar represented.
From what we know, during the first phase of the settlement people lived in wooden huts. They had a large collective building made of stone, but most of the dwellings were circular wooden huts, which is in strong contrast with what happened in the two later phases, when buildings were mainly rectangular or trapezoidal and made of stone.
They also built a huge fortification at La Bastida, and it is one of the most paradigmatic examples of how the two periods differed. Typically, during the Chalcolithic, as we see at the famous site of Los Millares, you have fortifications. They weren’t invented in El Argar. Often they are on plateaux and near rivers and the bulwarks are round and often hollow and the people were inside, not just at times of conflict, but also carrying out domestic or productive activities. Violence was an aspect of Chalcolithic life, but not necessarily a dominant one. When we look at La Bastida – and we know from radiocarbon dating that the fortification is from around 2200-2100 BCE, basically the very start of El Argar – we see that its settlers fortified the part of the mountain that is not naturally protected. The towers are solid, massive, and squarish. They are shaped like the trunk of a pyramid. Very different. They’re also not hollow, so people were not inside the towers doing something else. The whole way in which the fortification was designed with its entrance, its narrow passage, the sloping terrain between the towers… everything about it tells us about a specific militarised planning of a wall that was meant to not let any army pass through. This is a clear difference between the two worlds.
Yet we know very little about the formative El Argar period. We have very few tombs, and even with the pottery we know very little. So, the whole material culture of early El Argar is less well known.
But at the other site we’re excavating, La Almoloya, we have three settlement phases that correspond to three phases of El Argar. Our team has excavated 90% of the surface and we know the heyday of El Argar very well, around 1750-1550 BCE, but, again, we don’t know so much about the earliest phase. Right now, however, we are learning more because we are taking advantage of an unfortunate situation. The site suffered a lot from looting. There were around a hundred looting pits. The south part was so damaged in its later phase that we took the decision to document it very well, remove it, and then start excavating parts from the middle and early phases, further below.
So, we are now starting to see a bit more of the early period, which is the kind of material we are working on at the moment.
The fortification at La Bastida: ASOME-Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Image © Proyecto.bastida, CC BY-SA 3.0 < https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 >, via Wikimedia Commons.
ScienceVega: What other discoveries have you made at the sites you are excavating?
MV: We have some very interesting discoveries at La Bastida, and not just the fortification. We have found a huge water reservoir with the capacity for 300,000 to 400,000 litres of water. We had an excavation campaign funded by National Geographic, in which we discovered a huge rock-cut water channel. At La Almoloya we also found what was very likely a political building – it was clearly a meeting place within a larger building complex which, if it had been found in Greece, would definitely have been called a palace. Underneath the floor of this ‘Meeting Hall’ there was a princely tomb, so wealthy that nothing like it had been seen since the early excavations at the end of the 19th Century. These recent discoveries, all from the last fifteen years, have been making headlines and have made El Argar much more ‘iconic’ for the public.
MV: We have some very interesting discoveries at La Bastida, and not just the fortification. We have found a huge water reservoir with the capacity for 300,000 to 400,000 litres of water. We had an excavation campaign funded by National Geographic, in which we discovered a huge rock-cut water channel. At La Almoloya we also found what was very likely a political building – it was clearly a meeting place within a larger building complex which, if it had been found in Greece, would definitely have been called a palace. Underneath the floor of this ‘Meeting Hall’ there was a princely tomb, so wealthy that nothing like it had been seen since the early excavations at the end of the 19th Century. These recent discoveries, all from the last fifteen years, have been making headlines and have made El Argar much more ‘iconic’ for the public.
Other explanations that people have considered include climate crisis. It has also been said that this migration of Steppe people might have been associated with, or facilitated by, the spread of a plague of Yersinia Pestis. We might have thought it was possible we had a demographic decline in southeast Iberia because there was a plague and that might partially have fit into a theory of an invasion. The thing is we don’t have any actual evidence of individuals with the plague buried in this period. As far as we know, the first evidence we have of Yersinia Pestis is from a Late Bronze Age burial, so much later, at a site called El Sotillo, in northeast Spain.
This is the reason that we can’t speak positively about the scenario of a plague. We just don’t have the evidence. It would be great to have more radiocarbon dates and more ancient DNA analyses for tombs, either from the Late Chalcolithic or the earliest Bronze Age, that is, the earliest El Argar phase. Hopefully, research will head in that direction soon.
