Casas de Turuñuelo and Tartessos Spain

Interesting archaeological news from a site southwestern Spain known as Casas de Turuñuelo:

Around 2,500 years ago, close to what is known today as the municipality of Guareña in Spain’s Badajoz province, locals gathered in an enormous two-story building for a banquet and a ritual ceremony in which they sacrificed dozens of valuable animals. Afterwards, they burned the building and buried the remains before abandoning the site.

The animals identified so far are "22 horses, three cows, two pigs, two sheep and one donkey," one of the largest collections of sacrificed beasts in the whole Mediterranean world. It is also interesting that these victims were not laid out in a tomb, but on the lower floor of a large building, perhaps a palace. The archaeologists think the sacrifice marked the abandonment of the building; it seems to have been burned and pretty thoroughly wrecked at the same time, and then never used again. They speculate that the gods needed serious propitiation after some disaster, perhaps a plague, so this building and all its contents were sacrificed along with the animals. I find myself wondering if people thought the cause of the gods' anger was centered in this  building, which leads me to imagine sordid palace intrigues and some sort of "people rebel against Rasputin" scenario.

The archaeologists are especially excited about the stone staircase you can see in this view, the only intact one from the region and the only clear evidence so far for a two-story building from this culture. 

Which is the culture known in the classical world as Tartessos; sometimes we call it Tartessian, but just as often Tartesos or Tartessos. This grew up in southwestern Iberia after the Phoenicians arrived some time around 900 BC. The Phoenicians were mainly after metals such as copper and silver; mining was carried out so intensely for so along in some parts of Spain that special subspecies of fish evolved to live in rivers tainted with acid and heavy metals.

Casas de Turuñuelo is back in the archaeological news this week because these "almost life-sized" sculpted heads have been assembled from fragments found in the ruins of the palace. Five heads were identified in all, the others less complete than these. The pieces came from separate rooms, reinforcing the idea that this place was thoroughly and purposefully destroyed. They are the oldest well-made human faces from this part of the world. They have inspired a lot of over-the-top rhetoric from Spanish nationalists along the lines of, "we have our own great civilizations, we weren't just barbarians who had to be civilized by the Romans." Like this from the English version of El Pais:

Every fresh discovery at the Casas de Turuñuelo archeological site in Guareña, Badajoz — where a huge 2,500-year-old two-floor building is being unearthed ­— makes it more difficult to sustain the accepted theory that the Tartessian culture that occupied the southwestern Iberian Peninsula between the 9th and 5th centuries B.C. was not a sophisticated civilization with its own entities. 

Which is a lot to hang on five fragmentary terracotta faces, and anyway the Romans never claimed that the people of southern Iberia were barbarians. But that's just how some people seem to approach the past.

Spanish and Portuguese archaeologists have long been fascinated by Tartessos, and the archaeological museum in Seville is full of Tartessian artifacts like this golden hoard, and the objects below. And it is just the kind of thing I love, a culture for which the written records give hints but no more, where some things may be interpreted using our knowledge of the Phoenicians but nobody knows how much the meanings may have been changed by these non-semitic people at the end of Europe, where strange things like the destructive abandonment of Casas de Turuñuelo made sense under a system of logic we can reach for but never grasp.