Cultural Continuity and Social Resistance: The Chronology of Megalithic Funerary Practices in Southern Iberia

Abstract

Inspired by the biographical approach to the study of material culture, a radiocarbon dating programme was undertaken to explore the chronology and temporality of the megalithic monuments in south-eastern Iberia. Instead of one or two dates per tomb, the normal way of approaching this complex issue, we carried out a complete radiocarbon dating series of single tombs based on human remains. We focused our attention on four tholos-type tombs in the cemetery of El Barranquete (Almería, Spain). According to the new radiocarbon series modelled in a Bayesian framework, four main conclusions can be drawn: that the cemetery shows a very long period of funerary activity, which began in the late fourth millennium and ended in the last centuries of the second millennium calbc; that continuity of ritual practices attained an unexpected importance during the Bronze Age; that interments, which fall into cultural periods that would be unthinkable if only the typological properties of the grave goods were considered, occurred; and that each tomb had a complex and very different biography.

Placing and remembering the dead in late Neolithic Malta: bioarchaeological and spatial analysis of the Xagħra Circle Hypogeum, Gozo

“…Indications of a structured use of space and long histories of burial within monuments has led to much research on the mechanisms by which bonds with the dead were severed or maintained, and the extent to which the burial population reflected the living community (e.g. Alt et al 2016;Aranda Jiménez et al 2018;Bayliss and Whittle 2007;Schulting et al 2010). Early Neolithic British burial monuments, in use for several generations, may convincingly be argued as places of commemoration, although the highly fragmented remains they contain are variously perceived as reflecting intentional disintegration (Shanks and Tilley 1982) and carefully articulated relations of remembrance (Jones 2005).…”

An Ethnographic and Archaeological Approach to Ritual Practices of Resistance

“…As most of the bone remains had lost their anatomical connections, the criterion used to select the samples to be dated was the minimum number of individuals. This was the best way of ensuring that no individual was analyzed twice (Aranda Jiménez et al, 2018;Díaz-Zorita Bonilla et al, 2016).…”

“…8 These new series were modeled in a Bayesian framework and four main and surprising conclusions were drawn: (1) the cemetery shows a very long period of funerary activity, which began in the late fourth millennium and ended in the first decades of the first millennium cal. BCE; (2) the continuity of ritual practices attained an unexpected importance during the Bronze Age, of the 44 dates in the radiocarbon series, the 48% concentrates their intervals of probability at 95% in the Bronze Age, mainly during the EBA; (3) the finds of interments belonging to the Late Bronze Age was a complete surprise, as there had been no archaeological evidence suggesting that ritual activity had extended to that time; and (4) each tomb had a complex and very different biography (Aranda Jiménez et al, 2018).…”

La cronología radiocarbónica de las primeras manifestaciones megalíticas en el sureste de la Península Ibérica: las necrópolis de Las Churuletas, La Atalaya y Llano del Jautón (Purchena, Almería)

“…Para el desarrollo de este programa de dataciones se seleccionaron necrópolis representativas de la diversidad de sepulturas megalíticas conocidas en la región, como la necrópolis de El Barranquete (Níjar, Almería), formada por sepulturas tipo tholos o de falsa cúpula, cuyos resultados han sido recientemente publicados (Aranda Jiménez y Lozano Medina 2014; Díaz-Zorita et al . 2016;Aranda Jiménez et al . 2017a).…”

“…Otra es la necrópolis de Panoria (Darro, Granada) consistente en tumbas ortostáticas de corredor excavadas en 2015 por nuestro grupo de investigación (Benavides et al . 2016;Aranda Jiménez et al . 2017b) y, finalmente, varias necrópolis de sepulturas, en su mayoría de tipo rundgräber, agrupadas en el denominado como "Grupo Purchena" (Almería).…”