Evocative Monuments in the Late 3rd Millennium BC: Reassessing Depositional Practices beyond Funerary and Domestic Realms

Abstract

This paper challenges customary archaeological accounts of non-megalithic tumuli during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age. Because of their wide range of regional and chronological variability across Atlantic Europe, rigid interpretative templates based on restrictive Western concepts such as ‘domestic’ or ‘funerary’ become inadequate. The analysis of several well-documented case studies in the Central Meseta (Iberia) through a programme of fieldwork prompts reconsideration of some uncontested assumptions extrapolated from research on megaliths and funerary contexts associated with Bell Beaker pottery. Some of these constructions lack actual layering or clear structures, their material assemblages are scarce, scattered and highly fragmented – including everyday residues and partial Beakers – and luxury items or human remains are barely recovered from them. The article discusses these peculiarities and confusing contents, commonly regarded as being the result of post-abandonment disturbance. A taphonomic assessment of their cultural debris attentive to formation processes and a comparison among depositional contexts within their local settings allow reappraisal of these constructions other than simply as areas of occupation or looted burials. Some of them could be better understood in terms of complementariness and mutual reference, as being the outcome of evocative practices that, through quotation and emulation, linked together absent places, beings and episodes.

Keywords:

• Round barrows
• Iberia
• Chalcolithic
• Early Bronze Age
• Bell Beaker
• assemblage-based approach
• ceramic taphonomy
• inter-contextual analysis

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This paper is based on the outcomes of a fieldwork programme carried out under the co-direction of J. F. Fabián and the author. Thanks go to a large group of undergraduate students from diverse Spanish universities for their unselfish labour. Dr Rafael Garrido-Pena (UAM, Madrid) and Miss Cristina Tejedor (University of Valladolid) provided me with information and help. I am indebted to Dr Marcus Brittain (Cambridge Archaeological Unit) for thorough proof-reading and commenting on earlier draft manuscripts. Prof John Chapman (Durham University), Prof Felipe Criado (CSIC), the editorial staff of the journal and two anonymous referees are thanked for their constructive and useful criticisms and suggestions. This research has been possible thanks to a European Commission-funded Marie Curie Intra-European Grant (298285).