Forensic Scientists Exhume 20th-Century Mass Grave in Spain

CNN reports that forensic archaeologists and anthropologists from Cranfield University and the Complutense University of Madrid, and social anthropologists from Mapas de Memoria, are exhuming the remains of 26 people executed by local right-wing partisans during the rule of dictator General Francisco Franco at the end of the Spanish Civil War, between 1939 and 1940, and buried in a mass grave in a civil cemetery in central Spain.

Researchers from Cranfield are working with colleagues from the University Complutense of Madrid (UCM) and Mapas de Memoria (Maps of Memory) at the site in the Ciudad Real province.

Similar efforts around the country have recovered more than 7,000 victims of the Spanish Civil War since 2000, the press release said.
Experts are looking for 26 people in total, with carpenters, teachers and farmers among their number, excavation leader Nicholas Márquez-Grant, senior lecturer in forensic anthropology at Cranfield Forensic Institute, told CNN Tuesday.

Researchers know whose remains are in the cemetery because they are registered as being buried there, but their deaths are listed as natural, rather than executions, he added.

They have already recovered several bodies with gunshot wounds to the head, bits of clothing and other personal effects, such as buttons, a pencil, and a fountain pen added Márquez-Grant, who said the victims were executed by local right-wing partisans rather than Francoist soldiers.

Family members of the victims have been contacted and it is hoped that DNA analysis can match them and allow for a proper burial of the remains, although matching DNA is not a certainty, said Márquez-Grant.

Some family members have visited the cemetery, where photographs of the victims have been hung up by the researchers.

“It’s quite powerful,” added Márquez-Grant, who said two elderly sisters had visited the site. Their father was executed at the cemetery when they were small children.

Maria Benito Sanchez, director of the scientific team for the project from the School of Legal Medicine at UCM, added in the press release: “As forensic anthropology professionals we have the responsibility of putting our science to the service of the relatives who have been searching for their loved ones for a long time now.”

The team will carry out excavations at the site until the beginning of June, then anthropological and DNA analysis will be carried out until the end of the year to identify the remains.

Jorge Moreno, director of Maps of Memory, said 21 families of victims have been identified relevant to the excavation so far.

The Almagro cemetery site is the largest mass grave opened so far in the province, but there are other larger ones known to hold the remains of hundreds of people.

Franco emerged the winner from Spain’s 1936-39 civil war and ruled the country until his death in 1975. Thousands of executions were carried out by his nationalist regime during the civil war and in the following years.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has pledged to support efforts to exhume and identify victims of the civil war. Márquez-Grant said government officials have visited the site in Almagro.

“We’ve now been asked to open more mass graves in the region,” said Márquez-Grant, who hailed the success of a model which involves close cooperation between social anthropologists, forensic anthropologists, forensic archaeologists and geneticists.

Some people in Spain complain that the process has taken far too long and bemoan the fact that many relatives of civil war victims have died before they could recover their remains, but Márquez-Grant says that identifying the victims wouldn’t have been possible in the 1970s or 1980s. “It has come at the right time because we’ve got the science to do this,” he said.

Newly Discovered Cave Paintings Suggest Early Man Was Battling A Lot Of Inner Demons

The discovery of cave drawings in northern Spain by a team from the University of Cambridge suggests that prehistoric people struggled with a range of inner demons, nagging worries, and anxieties as they struggled with life’s demands in the Paleolithic era.

According to lead researcher Alan Reddy, the images found on the limestone walls and ceiling of the cave trace back to 14,000 B.C. and seem to indicate that early hunter-gatherers were often anxious about their ability to kill game animals, reeled from the challenges of raising a family, and “generally had a really hard time keeping it together.”

“While these pictographs are crude in terms of their rendering of human anatomy, they have a vivid expressive quality that led our team to surmise that Ice Age humans had an awful lot of personal stuff going on,” said Reddy, showing reporters a photo of a rudimentary figure painted in smeared charcoal that appeared to be on its knees weeping into its hands.

“Although we don’t want to read too much into these images at this point, it’s hard not to deduce that our prehistoric ancestors were often desperately lonely and felt like they had no one else to turn to.”

“This one seems as if it’s suddenly waking up in the middle of the night,” added Reddy, pointing to a figure that appeared to be sitting bolt upright on a mat of antelope skin. “If you look carefully, you can still see how the artist used daubs of yellow clay to drench him in sweat.”

Reddy confirmed that other images in the cave include a downcast man apparently being mocked by potential mates for his inability to start a fire, a woman using a stone chopping implement to cut her own body, and a seated man seemingly resigned to his fate at the approach of a charging mastodon.

Further chemical analysis will have to be conducted to determine if the ominous red handprints along the walls were symbolic works rendered in red ochre or simply the result of anguished early humans striking the stone surface until they started to bleed.

“What’s remarkable is how, with just a few basic pigments and the most primitive painting tools, our ancestors could so intensely portray their dread of dying alone or their toxic jealously of alpha males,” said Reddy, adding that only a highly-skilled but extremely alienated artist could use nothing but melted animal fat blown through a hollow bone to convey his dismay at having no one he could consider a close friend and realizing he was too old to make new ones.

“It’s clear that these humans felt so disconnected from one another, so unable to constructively address their problems, that they used these sad, disturbing paintings as their sole outlet for comfort.”

According to Reddy, the paintings not only represent the ability of Late Stone Age humans to express their immediate emotional torment but perhaps also to construct larger, more elaborate narratives of their prolonged, agonizing downward spirals.

Through paint-application analysis and radiocarbon dating methods, Reddy said his team was able to determine that individual artists sometimes depicted their unravelling over a series of months or even years.

“Here you can see the same figure gorging on bison and growing more and more obese, apparently stuck in a lengthy cycle of compulsive overeating,” said Reddy, adding that the self-destructive pattern was broken only once by an extremely brief sequence of dynamic images suspected to be a quickly abandoned attempt at the aerobic activity.

“The drawings finally stop after about 20 meters with a half-finished pictograph of what we speculate is the poor man attempting and failing to fit into his deer-hide frock and pants and then, out of apparent shame, opting not to leave his cave all day.”

“Honestly, I’m glad the paintings didn’t go on much longer,” added Reddy. “Archaeological discovery or not, it’s hard to watch a guy like this.”

The discovery of the images comes just weeks after archaeologists uncovered a separate set of cave paintings in southern France, whose artists reportedly hunted, reared children, and otherwise did the best they could without taking themselves so goddamn seriously.

Remains of wooden safe excavated from the burned-out roman villa in Spain

A rare strongbox from the 4th century A.D. has been discovered in the Casa del Mitreo, a Roman villa in west-central Spain.

The area Ferrata, a wooden chest armed with bronze cladding and iron spikes, was used as a safe for valuables — coin, jewellery, textiles, important documents — in Roman homes and businesses. Because they are mostly made of wood, only four others are known to survive.

Three of the extant examples were preserved under the extraordinary conditions of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The only other arca Ferrata found in Spain was discovered in Tarazona, Aragon, northeastern Spain.

The Domus was dubbed Casa del Mitreo because a sanctuary believed to be Mithraeum was discovered nearby. The villa was built in the late 1st, early 2nd century and was remodelled and expanded several times over the next centuries. It was located outside the ancient Roman city Emerita Augusta (modern-day Mérida).

“It is unclear what the owner did for a living. But it is clear that it was probably a wealthy family because the surface of the house is around 3,386 square meters (36,447 square feet), with 15 rooms, including the bathrooms and the kitchen, as well as four other rooms,” said [Archaeologist Ana Maria Bejarano] Osario.

Osario said: “It is unclear what they did for a living, but it might be something related to commerce or business, and they could even have been using the four extra rooms themselves to sell their wares.”

The house also had two more rooms on the second floor, including the one that collapsed during the fire, the causes of which are unknown.

The remains of the arca Ferrata were first discovered in 1994 during excavations in a room of a building that had suffered a fire in the 4th century.

At the time, the condition of the exposed organic remains was precarious, so the team decided to leave it in situ and prevent further deterioration as much as possible.

It wasn’t until 2017 that a comprehensive conservation and consolidation project at the Casa del Mitreo tackled the burned room once more.

It was fully excavated and documented, as were the paintings and artefacts inside the room. It is misshapen from the effects of the fire which collapsed the roof onto the coffer and drove it into the ground. Today it measures 9.8 by 4.9 feet, but its original measurements are unknown.

Archaeologists consolidated the remains to keep the metal parts from oxidizing and the wood from decay.

It was removed intact and transferred to the Institute of Cultural Heritage of Spain (IPCE) of the Ministry of Culture and Sports where it will be studied, stabilized and restored for future display.

Child’s Coffin Discovered at the Real Alcázar of Seville

El País reports that the remains of a child were discovered under the floor near the main altar in the chapel at the Real Alcázar of Seville, a royal palace in southern Spain. The burial was found during work to restore the palace’s sixteenth-century ceramic tiles, which were designed by artist Cristobal de Augusta.

The sarcophagus contained a disintegrating wooden coffin and a complete skeleton – the first to be found in the Real Alcázar – along with pieces of fabric, shoe leather and two mother-of-pearl buttons.

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel Tabales, who is leading the research, is in no doubt that the altar of the chapel was not the little girl’s original burial place.

He also believes she must have belonged to a very powerful family to be buried within the royal palace. His theory is that she was placed to the side of the altar when the chapel was repaved between 1930 and 1940.

“We have not found any documentation to confirm it, but the lead coffin was surrounded by a cist [stone coffin] made from reused bricks held together with cement, materials that tell us it is from the first half of the 20th century,” he says.

“My theory is that the workers found the sarcophagus in another area, opened it and, on seeing it was a corpse, decided to cover it decently and place it near the altar.”

The researchers are in the preliminary stages of examining the coffin and its contents and are still hoping to find a seal in the lead or any mark in the remains of the wood that will offer clues to the identity of the little girl, who was neatly laid out with her hair combed, as can be seen from the pieces of her skull, fractured by the weight of the marble floor.

The theory they are working on is that she lived between the end of the 13th and the end of the 14th centuries. Both the team of archaeologists and the director of the Real Alcázar, Isabel Rodríguez, along with palace warden, Román Fernández-Baca, are convinced that other corpses will emerge. “This is the tip of the iceberg,” says Tabales.

“When we saw the sarcophagus, we immediately thought that there could be more in the basement of the chapel. It could be a crypt that was part of the gothic palace, built by [King] Alfonso X, the Wise, in the second half of the 13th century over the old Almohad palace.”

Fernández-Baca, former director-general of fine arts for the Culture Ministry, believes the next step will be to put the body into context.

“We are going to make a study of the subsoil using a geo-radar to examine what physical elements we may come across and that information will be passed to the Alcázar’s executive committee who will decide how to proceed,” says the warden, who estimates that in three months they will have the results of the carbon-14 test to determine the age of the girl – jokingly dubbed the Berenguela girl (after the marble-like stone) by researcher Enriqueta Vila, who has been to view the discovery along with archaeologist and historian, Pilar León-Castro, both of whom are on the palace’s governing board.

Anthropologist Juan Manuel Guijo, who is in charge of studying the remains, hopes that the tests will provide information about the girl’s lineage, where she lived, the cause of death and the funeral rites performed at her burial. “She had her arms semi-flexed and crossed over her thorax,” notes Guijo. “And the body had not been tampered with.

We will be able to extract her DNA from the root bulb of her hair [rather than the bones] because when the wood disintegrated, the bones came into contact with the lead, which alters the results of this test.

If we find remains of oils, we will know if she was an important person and also if she had been embalmed, a ritual forbidden by the Catholic Church, but which the wealthy practised in their quest for eternal life.”

It is still not known what the girl died of, although a permanent fully formed molar has helped the anthropologist to calculate she was around five years old and fair hairs on the nape of her neck that she was blonde.

Besides the location, the fact she was buried in a lead sarcophagus – measuring 116 centimetres long and 40 centimetres wide at the head and 30 centimetres at the foot with a depth of 30 centimetres –suggests she was from a wealthy background.

Next to the bones of the little girl, six boxes containing an earthy substance have not yet been examined and may hold further surprises.

The neanderthal family found cannibalised in a cave in Spain

Researchers uncovered the bones of a possible family group of Neanderthals, including an infant, in a cave in Spain. The bones of the 12 people display evidence of cannibalism, suggesting another Neanderthal group came along and chowed down on the meat.

According to the study, this tribe of Neanderthals died about 49,000 years ago. Shortly after, the cave collapsed due to a powerful storm or another natural catastrophe, burying their bodies at the El Sidron site.

The finding, detailed in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals for the first time genetic evidence of a social kin Neanderthal group. Analyses suggest the group included three adult males, three adult females, three adolescents (possibly all male), two juveniles (one 5 to 6 years old and the other from 8 to 9), and an infant.

“I think this is a pretty significant piece of research, and [it] really adds to the forensic understanding of what happened in that cave,” said John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not involved in the current study, referring to the possibility of cannibalism.

“I don’t see any real reason to question the scenario, but like most cases of archaeological finds, there are always questions as to the fidelity of the evidence,” Hawks told LiveScience in an e-mail. “That being said, my inclination would be to revisit some other Neanderthal sites keeping in mind the relatively strong evidence of cannibalism and systematic ‘warfare’ at El Sidron.

I think there are other pieces that can be put together into a stronger case across many sites — that is I don’t think this was a single incident without parallels elsewhere”

Neanderthal family

The remains have been unearthed over the last 10 years. “They were difficult to isolate because they are highly fragmented, due to the cannibalism,” said lead author Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, adding, they included: lots of teeth, mandibles, long bones and skull fragments.

The researchers used mitochondrial DNA, which resides in the energy-making structures of cells, to determine who was related to whom. This type of DNA, unlike nuclear DNA, gets passed down from females only. To figure out the sex of the individuals, the team analyzed the remains for a Y chromosome, since only males are equipped with a Y.

Results suggested the child about 8 to 9 years old was the offspring of one of the female adults, while another adult female was the mother of the infant and child about 5 or 6. The three adult males shared mtDNA, suggesting they were brothers or otherwise related through the maternal line.

Past research of the nuclear DNA from remains of the women who bore the 5- or 6-year-old child suggests she was a redhead, Lalueza-Fox said during a telephone interview. Those results were published in a past issue of the journal Science.

Clues to cannibalism

“There are many different markings in many different bones in all 12 individuals, including traditional cut marks to disarticulate bones and remove muscle insertions, snapping and fracturing of long bones to extract the marrow,” Lalueza-Fox told LiveScience.

These marks “could indicate that the assemblage corresponds to a Neandertal group processed by other Neandertals on the surface,” the researchers wrote. (Neandertal is an alternative spelling of Neanderthal.)

He pointed out that cannibalism is not rare among Neanderthals, though the current finding is unique in its scale (12 individuals). “The dating of 49,000 years ago, on the other hand, indicates that the cannibals should be other Neandertals since modern humans were not around at that time in Europe,” he said.

That means the men in the group are kin, while the women came from different kin groups — a phenomenon called patrilocality. “The authors’ hypothesis about patrilocality is consistent with the mtDNA, and I think it is likely to be the correct one,” Hawks writes in his blog. He adds, however, that the interpretation isn’t foolproof.

“For one thing, Neandertals are already known to be relatively low in mtDNA variation, with very little regional population structure in the mtDNA. In such a population, it wouldn’t be surprising to find individuals sharing the same mtDNA haplotype, even if they were not close kin,” Hawks writes.

The Mystery of the Giant Crystals: How the 36-foot Geode of Pulpí Formed

In an abandoned mine in southern Spain, there is a room of pure crystal.  You have to go to a deep tunnel, get into a ladder in the rocks, and squeeze across a jagged gypsum crystal tube that is barely wide enough for a person. If you make it that far, you’ll be standing inside the world’s largest geode: the Pulpí Geode, a 390-cubic-foot (11 cubic meters) cavity about the size of a cement mixer drum, studded with crystals as clear as ice and sharp as spears on every surface.

While you may have never stood inside a geode, you’ve probably held, or at least seen, one before.

“Many people have little geodes in their home,” Juan Manuel García-Ruiz, a geologist at the Spanish National Research Council and co-author of a new paper on the history of the Pulpí Geode, told BBC. “It’s normally defined as an egg-shaped cavity inside a rock, lined with crystals.”

Those crystals can form after water seeps through tiny pores on a rock’s surface, ferrying even tinier minerals into the hollow interior. Depending on the size of the rock cavity, crystals can continue growing for thousands or millions of years, creating caches of amethyst, quartz and many other shiny minerals.

The crystal columns at Pulpí are made of gypsum — the product of water, calcium sulfate, and lots and lots of time — but not much else has been revealed about them since the geode’s unexpected discovery in 2000.

In a study published in the journal Geology, García-Ruiz and his colleagues attempted to shed some new light on the mysterious cave by narrowing down how and when the geode formed.

García-Ruiz is no stranger to giant crystals. In 2007, he published a study on Mexico’s fantastical Cave of Crystals, a basketball-court-size cavern of gypsum beams as big as telephone poles buried 1,000 feet (300 m) below the town of Naica.

Uncovering the history of that “Sistine Chapel of crystals,” as García-Ruiz called it, was made easier by the fact that the crystals were still growing in the mine’s humid bowels. 

At Pulpí, however, the mine was completely dry, and the geode’s crystals had not grown in tens of thousands of years. On top of that, the geode’s gypsum spikes are incredibly pure — so translucent that “you can see your hand through them,” García-Ruiz said.

This means they do not contain enough uranium isotopes to perform radiometric dating, a standard method of analyzing how different versions of elements radioactively decay to date very old rocks. 

“We had no idea what happened,” García-Ruiz said. “So, we were required to make a cartography of the entire mine to understand its very complicated geology.”

The researchers analyzed and radiometrically dated rock samples around the mine for seven years to figure out how the area had changed since its formation hundreds of millions of years ago. The team’s driving question: Where did the calcium sulfate in the Pulpí Geode come from?

Ultimately, the researchers narrowed down the geode’s formation to a window of about 2 million years (not bad for the 4.5-billion-year-old calendar of geologic time). The crystals must be at least 60,000 years old, the team found because that was the youngest age of a bit of carbonate crust growing on one of the largest crystals in the geode. Since the crust is on the outside of a crystal, the crystal below must be even older, García-Ruiz explained.

Meanwhile, the composition of other minerals in the mine suggests that calcium sulfate was not introduced to the area until after an event called the Messinian Salinity Crisis — the near-total emptying of the Mediterranean Sea that is believed to have occurred about 5.5 million years ago. 

Based on the size of the gypsum crystals, it’s likely they started forming less than 2 million years ago, through a very slow-growing process called Ostwald ripening, in which large crystals form through the dissolution of smaller ones, García-Ruiz said. For an everyday example of this process, peer into your freezer.

When ice cream ages past its prime, small ice crystals begin to break away from the rest of the treat. As more time passes, those small crystals lose their shape and recombine into larger crystals, giving the old ice cream a distinctly gritty texture. 

The Pulpí Geode may not be as tasty as ice cream, but merely knowing that magical places like this exist comes with its own sweet satisfaction.

Thanks in part to the research team’s mapping efforts, tourists are now allowed to visit the Pulpí Geode, and García-Ruiz certainly wouldn’t blame you for doing so. Squeezing past the jagged gypsum gateway and into the geode’s cavity for the first time several years ago, García-Ruiz recalled one feeling: “euphoria.”

Munigua, a hidden Roman city in the Sevilla sierra, spain

There is no shortage of Roman ruins in Spain. Some are in the middle of modern city centres, such as Mérida’s theatre and amphitheatre, in Extremadura. Or Itálica, which is reachable by bus from Seville. Others are out in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a track, in a random field. This was the case with Munigua, making it a reasonable option to explore in the middle of a pandemic.

The story of Munigua

For centuries it was taken for granted that the temple must have been an ancient castle, abandoned after some old war. Only recently, when the Roman inscriptions appeared, the scholars realized that they were dealing with a Roman temple.

But this temple is way too big for the size of the city. We do not know to which deity it was dedicated. Given its enormous size, it must have been a significant Iberian god or goddess. 

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Munigua was founded in the III century BCE before Romans came. But let’s not lose hope: excavations have been going on for over 60 years, so sooner or later we will know!

The Romans took over the Iberian city because it was located close to very rich mines. But alas, an earthquake destroyed the town in the III century ADE, and it was never rebuilt.

The mines had been worn out already, and the city was far away from everything. Some people stayed there to live, especially the Moorish. In Munigua, you can actually see the oldest Moorish tombs in Spain. But it was not an important city anymore. In the XII century, it was definitely abandoned.  

Since then, people simply have forgotten that once upon a time, there had been a whole city right in this spot. This is how you find Munigua today: in the middle of the same landscape that the Romans knew -wild, unique, still full of mysteries. 

The visit to Munigua

If you plan to go to Munigua, make sure that the weather conditions are right. If it is raining, it will not be opened. On the bright side, the entrance is free.

Bring your drinks and food -there are no shops there. Think of this visit as if you went for a hike to the mountains! Do not forget solar protection -it is Sevilla, so it will be most likely sunny – and comfortable shoes -after all, you are going to walk at least 6 km!

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There are few cities in Spain like Munigua. You get to walk around its ancient streets and get inside the very well preserved buildings. The shovels of the archaeologists have dug out thermae, big houses, a forum, temples, some parts of the ancient city wall.

The funny thing about this one… it was never ended. Also, it went through the two necropoleis of the town, which was very strange for a Roman city: the dead people were always left outside. Same thing with the main temple, at the top of the hill: its architecture in terraces is very atypical in the Roman world. 

The whole city is built indeed on terraces, with stairs going in all directions, like big chaos, very unlike the civilized Roman order. We can only assume that the previous Iberian inhabitants never entirely left!

She Was Buried With a Silver Crown. Was She the One Who Held Power?

According to a New York Times report, a 3,700-year-old tomb holding the remains of a man and a woman has been found in southeastern Spain at the El Argar site of La Almoloya. 

Their tomb was an ovoid jar beneath the floor of a grand hall in an expansive hilltop complex known as La Almoloya, in what is now Murcia, Spain. It’s one of many archaeological sites associated with the El Argar culture of the Early Bronze Age that controlled an area about the size of Belgium from 2200 B.C. to 1500 B.C.

Judging by the 29 high-value objects in the tomb, described Thursday in the journal Antiquity, the couple appear to have been members of the Argaric upper class. And the woman may have been the more important of the two, raising questions for archaeologists about who wielded power among the Argarics and adding more evidence to a debate about the role of women in prehistoric Europe.

She died in her 20s, possibly of tuberculosis, and had been placed on her back with her legs bent toward the man. In life, she had a range of congenital anomalies such as a shortened, fused spine and a stunted left thumb.

On and around her were sublime silver emblems of wealth and power. Her hair had been fastened with silver spirals, and her silver earlobe plugs — one larger than the other — had silver spirals looped through them. A silver bracelet was near her elbow, and a silver ring was still on her finger. Silver embellished the diamond-shaped ceramic pot near her, and triple plates of silver embellished her oak-wood awl — a symbol of womanhood.

Her most fantastic silver artefact is an impeccably crafted diadem — a headband-like crown — that still rested on her head. Only six have been discovered in Argaric graves.

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She would have shimmered in life. “Imagine the diadem with a disc going down to the tip of her nose,” said Cristina Rihuete Herrada, an archaeologist and professor of prehistory at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and one of the discoverers of the burial. “It’s shining. You could actually see yourself in the disc. Framing the eyes of that woman would be a very, very impressive thing to see. And the ability of somebody to be reflected — their face in another face — would have been something shocking.”

The sound of her would have been dramatic too: “Think about the noise — this clink clink clink, because it’s silver against silver in these very large earlobes,” Dr Rihuete Herrada said. “That would make for a remarkable person.”

The man, who was in his 30s when he died, had been interred with his own fineries, including flared gold plugs in his ears. The silver ring that had once been on his finger had fallen off and lay near his lower back. By his side was a copper dagger fitted with four silver rivets.

Like their contemporaries — such as the Minoans of Crete, the Wessex of Britain and the Unetice of Central Europe — the Argarics had the hallmarks of a state society, with a ruling bureaucracy, geopolitical boundaries, complex settlement systems and urban centres with monumental structures. They had divisions of labour and class distinctions that persisted after death, based on the wide disparity of grave goods discovered at archaeological sites.

And while most of these systems have long been considered deeply patriarchal, the double burial at La Almoloya and other Argaric graves are making archaeologists reconsider life in ancient Iberia. Was she the one wielding the power? Was she a symbol of power but held none of her own? Did they share power or wield it in different realms?

They were buried beneath the floor of a great hall, where long benches lined the walls, and a podium stood before a hearth meant for warmth and light, not cooking. The space was big enough to hold about 50 people. “There have been hundreds of El Argar buildings excavated, and this one is unique. It’s quite clearly a building specialized in politics,” Dr Rihuete Herrada said.

The couple had at least one child together — an infant discovered buried beneath a nearby building was a genetic match to both of them.

In the El Argar culture, girls were given grave goods at an earlier age than boys were, indicating they were considered women before boys were considered men. Diadems are exclusively found with women, and their graves hold a richer variety of valuable goods. Some male elite warriors were buried with swords.

As for the power structure the two occupied, Dr Rihuete Herrada suggests that perhaps they held potency in different realms. The swords could suggest “that enforcement of government decisions will be in the hands of men. Maybe women were political rulers, but not alone,” she said.

She suggests that perhaps the Argarics were similar to the matrilineal Haudenosaunee (known also as the Iroquois), with women holding political and decision-making power — including over matters of the chiefdom, war and justice — but men being in control of the military.

These intriguing ideas fit into an emerging body of research from various archaeological studies in Europe that are re-examining female power during the Bronze Age.

“The fact that most of the grave goods, including all of those made of silver, were associated with the female clearly points to an individual that was considered highly important,” said Karin Frei, a research professor in archaeometry at the National Museum of Denmark. “It makes sense to raise the question of whether a class-based state-society could be ruled by women.”

Dr Frei is the director of Tales of Bronze Age People, which uses methods such as biogeochemical and biomolecular analyses to study the remains from both elite and commoner burials in Denmark. “In several parts of Bronze Age Europe, females might have played a much bigger role in political and/or long-distance networks than previously thought,” she said.

Joanna Bruck, an expert in the Bronze Age of Britain and Ireland and head of the School of Archaeology at University College Dublin, says that the assumption that elite women of this era were “bartered brides,” exchanged as objects in networks of male power, is ripe for reconsideration.

The burial at La Almoloya “provides such clear evidence that women could hold special political power in the past,” Dr Bruck said. “I think we’ve got to be open to the possibility that they wielded power and agency. Of course, power is a really complex thing. You can have power in some contexts but not in others. We shouldn’t think of power being something that you have or don’t have.”