BETWEEN WARRIORS AND CHAMPIONS: WARFARE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE LATER PREHISTORY OF THE NORTH‐WESTERN IBERIAN PENINSULA¹

Abstract

Summary This article explores changes in the ‘art of warfare’ among societies in the north‐western Iberian Peninsula in the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. These changes are interpreted as a manifestation of the transformation experienced by societies living in the region first from ‘warrior societies’ to ‘societies with warriors’ at the end of the Bronze Age and then back to ‘warrior societies’ in the Late Iron Age. Evidence of individual combat as a manifestation of ‘societies with warriors’ is analysed in the broader context of Indo‐European and ethnographical examples. It reflects societies in which there were groups specialized in warfare and represents the establishment, in the region, of an Indo‐European warrior ideology.

Make a desert and call it peace: massacre at the Iberian Iron Age village of La Hoya

“…Here, cremation was the main funerary practice, and most of the available data for conflict are based on indirect evidence of warfare and ideological indicators of power (Sánchez-Moreno 2005), such as fortifications, weapons and images of warriors (e.g. Freire 2005;Sastre 2008;González-García 2009).…”

Societies against the Chief? Re-Examining the Value of “Heterarchy” as a Concept for Studying European Iron Age Societies

“…So conflict and violence may have been directed towards neighboring communities, following Clastres' (1977) ideas that have been applied to Later Iron Age Northwestern Iberia (e.g. González-García, 2009;Sastre-Prats, 2008). In a landscape characterized by small but strongly monumentalized sedentary hillforts, we can consider that warfare was a discursive referent to redirect internal problems outwards for the benefit of community integration and the mitigation of power instabilities.…”

The need to understand the cultural biographies of alpine and subalpine landscapes during Later Prehistory: Upland Archaeology in the Cantabrian Mountains

“…As monumentalized and well-defended villages, hillforts became the central nodes in Iron Age cultural, political and productive landscapes. Some authors have characterised these landscapes as 'divided' in relation to the increasing territorialisation of productive and political landscapes during the Iron Age (Parcero-Oubiña et al, 2007;Parcero-Oubiña and Criado-Boado, 2013) and the growing discursive relevance of warfare for these societies (González-García, 2009). These models endured until the expansion of the Roman state to north-western Iberia 2000 years ago in the so-called 'Cantabrian Wars' (29-19 BC) (Costa-García, 2018).…”