Lasers reveal ruins of the 5th-century fortress in the Spanish forest

Archaeologists in Spain got the surprise of a lifetime when they discovered the ruins of a powerful fifth-century fortress surrounded by a huge defensive wall in a dense forest, instead of the Iron Age fort they had been looking for, they reported in a new study. 

The team found the stronghold on a hilltop in northwestern Spain by using lidar — light detection and ranging — to peer beneath a forest covering the ruins. This technique, which bounces hundreds of thousands of laser pulses every second off the landscape from an aircraft flying overhead, revealed an early medieval fortress covering about 25 acres (10 hectares), with 30 towers and a defensive wall about three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) long.

The fortress seems to have been built in the first half of the fifth century A.D., possibly on top of an earlier Iron Age hilltop fort, to defend against Germanic invaders after Roman control of the region had collapsed, study author Mário Fernández-Pereiro, an archaeologist at University College London and the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), told Live Science.

The site, called Castro Valente (“Brave Fort”), is in the Galicia region’s Padrón district, about 16 miles (16 km) southwest of the city of Santiago de Compostela. 

Hilltop fortress

Locals thought Castro Valente had been built after the about ninth century B.C. by a Celtic people, called the “Callaeci” in Latin, who lived in Galicia at that time.

Another Celtic tribe, called the Astures, lived to the east in what’s now the Spanish region of Asturias, while others, called the Lusitani, lived to the south in what’s now Portugal.

Until they were subsumed by the expanding Roman Empire in the first century B.C., the Callaeci and the Astures formed the “Castro culture” of fortified hilltop settlements — and modern-day Galicia is filled with their ruins, according to the December 2022 study, published in Cuadernos de Arqueología de la Universidad de Navarra (Archaeological Journal of the University of Navarra).

When Fernández-Pereiro and José Carlos Sánchez-Pardo, also a USC archaeologist and co-author of the study, began researching the site, they also thought Castro Valente was a fortified Celtic settlement. But they soon found evidence that the buried structure was much larger than they expected and that parts of it were built with methods not used in the Iron Age.

The archaeological excavations “continued to provide data that point us towards a time of post-Roman occupation, presumably in the first half of the 5th century,” Fernánandez-Pereiro said in an email.

Germanic invaders

The fortress’s layout, construction and fragments of pottery found there suggest it was built after the Roman Empire lost control of the region in about the early fifth century A.D., when Spain was overrun by Germanic invaders. Galicia fell to the Suevi people (also spelled Suebi), who originated in the Elbe River region of what’s now Germany and the Czech Republic, and the fortress seems to have been built by local people for their defense at that time, Fernández-Pereiro said.

“We understand that the local powers of Galicia needed a tool to reaffirm and control the territory in the midst of this transition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages,” he said. 

But the fortress seems to have been abandoned roughly 200 years later, possibly because it was no longer needed, Fernández-Pereiro said. Future research may reveal more about it, as well as protect it from development, such as forest roads and wind farms. The team plans to regularly update their Facebook page, CastelosnoAire, as research progresses.

Ken Dark, an archaeologist at King’s College London who wasn’t involved in the study, told Live Science that the fifth-century Castro Valente site seemed to be based on the reuse of a Celtic fort — something that was also seen in Britain after the collapse of Roman rule.

In the fifth and sixth centuries A.D., many Britons from what are now Wales and Cornwall fled the Anglo-Saxon invasion by immigrating to Galicia, alongside the more famous migration of Britons to what’s now known as Brittany in western France, he said.

“It is fascinating to find a site like this in a region strongly associated with Britain during Late Antiquity,” Dark said.

CREDIT TO: livescience.com

1,800-Year-Old Sanctuary to Mithras discovered in Spain

Archaeologists excavating at Villa del Mitra in Cabra, Spain, have uncovered a sanctuary dedicated to the god Mithras, along with the remains of ritual banquets.

Mithraism rose to prominence as a cult religion that became popular in the Roman Empire in the late 1st century AD. Worship was a Romanised form of the Indo-Iranian god Mithra.

In Roman Empire during the 2nd and 3rd centuries, this deity was honored as the patron of loyalty to the emperor.

The Villa del Mitra, located within the Roman city of Licabrum, dates from the first century AD. The villa was named after a Mitra de Cabra sculpture discovered in situ in the second century AD, depicting Mithras sacrificing a bull (a symbol of death and resurrection).

Archaeologists from the University of Málaga, the Carlos III University of Madrid, and the University of Córdoba have, in the most recent excavations, uncovered the remains of a Mithraic sanctuary dating to the second century AD, with a second phase of construction from the end of the third century AD.

The sanctuary is a rectangular room located to the southwest of the Domus, measuring 7.2 by 2.5 meters (24 by 8 feet). It has a narrow entrance, that descends several steps leading into the sanctuary that has two flanking stone benches. On the right is a small water tank measuring 1.70 by 0.65 meters.

The research team believes that these benches were used by worshipers who sat to perform rituals and feasts in Mithras’ honor. The walls have fragments of Roman bricks, one of which has two holes or niches which would likely have held a tauroctony sculpture.

The floor is covered in a dark burnt layer that, upon closer inspection, revealed fragments of pigs, birds, and rabbits, indicating evidence of cooking during the ritual banquets.

The villa was originally excavated between 1972 and 1973, during which time a courtyard with a pond and several adjacent rooms with mosaic flooring was found.

Later excavations in 1981 uncovered the remains of a hypocaust, or subfloor heating system, as well as coins depicting Philip the Arab, Diocletian, and Valentinian II.

A former Spanish disco-pub confirmed as lost medieval Synagogue

In the Andalucian city of Utrera, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a 14th-century synagogue.

The discovery, made public on Tuesday, elevates the 14th-century structure to a rare group of medieval synagogues that have survived the years following Spain’s Jews were exiled in 1492.

Only 4 surviving synagogues in Spain after 1492 were known (two in Toledo, one in Segovia, and one in Cordoba).

For seven centuries the synagogue had been used later converted into a church, a hospital, and everything from a house for abandoned children to a restaurant and disco pub.

Over 400 years ago, there were references to the lost temple. “In that place, there were only foreign and Jewish people… who had their synagogue where the Hospital de la Misericordia now stands,” wrote local priest, historian, and poet Rodrigo Caro of Utrera in his 1604 history of the city.

The Utrera City Council decided to buy the building in 2016. However, the purchase price caused controversy. Critics questioned whether the purchase price was worth it, considering there was no hard evidence that the synagogue had ever been at that site.

There were no maps or official records describing the synagogue of medieval Utrera because Jewish communities in pre-expulsion Spain had a great deal of autonomy, including their own law courts and taxation systems.

Furthermore, even if the hospital was built over the synagogue, nothing of the original might have survived. Expulsions of Jews were frequently accompanied by violent pogroms, and unrestrained development in the twentieth century destroyed much of Utrera’s medieval city.

Regardless of objections, the city went ahead with the acquisition and ordered an archaeological investigation of the structure in November 2021.

They were able to confirm Caro’s story by identifying the synagogue’s prayer hall, the perimeter bench, and the Hechal, the Sephardic term for the ark of the Torah, the small chamber or niche where the scripture scrolls were kept.

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel de Dios told journalists that “the first thing to confirm is the presence of the prayer room” following years of analysis of the building’s walls and floor.

“The fundamental elements of the synagogue, such as the entrance hall,” he said, “or the perimeter benches that have emerged in this survey, now confirm that we are indeed in the prayer hall.”

Archaeologist Miguel Ángel de Dios and the team now hope to identify the pulpit and a bath used for rituals.

Did Neanderthals Keep Hunting Trophies?

A team of researchers affiliated with a host of institutions across Spain, working with one colleague from Portugal and another from Austria, has discovered a large number of animal skulls placed by Neanderthals in a Spanish cave more than 40,000 years ago.

In their paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the group describes the site where the skulls were found, their condition and theories about why the skulls were placed in the cave.

The Cueva Des-Cubierta cave located in the Madrid Region of Spain was first discovered in 1978. Since that time, archaeologists have visited and studied the multilevel cave because it became clear that Neanderthal groups used the site for conducting rituals.

Bones and tools have been found in the cave, as have the remains of a Neanderthal child. In this new study, the researchers climbed to the third level of the cave to see if Neanderthals had used it, as well.

The researchers found multiple animal bones scattered on the floor in addition to an assortment of large herbivore skulls. The researchers found that the skulls had been carefully removed from the bodies and had been “worked” in different ways using tools and, in some cases, fire.

A common theme among the skulls was the display of prominent features, such as horns. Most of the skulls had once belonged to bison or aurochs, extinct cows. But they also found the skulls of five male deer (with antlers) and two rhinoceroses.

The discovery of the rhinoceroses was a major surprise, and the researchers chose to name one of them Rosendo, after the famous Spanish rock star.

The team notes that finding such a collection of skulls suggests that the Neanderthal groups that brought them into the cave had something in mind besides food.

The skulls were large and heavy and would have provided little nourishment, suggesting their presence in the cave served some other purpose. The researchers suggest they may have represented hunting trophies.

Bronze Age eating, social habits in the Balearic Islands documented in study

Researchers from a variety of Spanish institutions have managed to reconstruct the diet of some 50 individuals buried more than 3,000 years ago in the Cova des Pas’ necropolis in Menorca.

The study, coordinated by the UAB, indicates a diet of plants and meat, with all individuals having the same access to food, implying that they were a socially egalitarian group.

These findings form part of the study on eating habits of Bronze and Iron Age groups living in the Balearic Islands and contribute to the debate on the emergence and development of the first complex societies on the archipelago. This is the most complete study conducted to date of the paleodiet of ancient populations inhabiting the Balearic Islands.

The individuals buried at the Cova des Pas site in Menorca between 3,600 and 2,800 years ago ate what the land had to offer, mainly plants, and also had a significant intake of animal protein.

This has been confirmed by a Spanish research team that has reconstructed the dietary pattern of 49 individuals buried in this collective tomb of the Talayotic culture, considered one of the largest and most exceptional prehistoric collections of human remains in the Balearic Islands.

The results also indicate that children were breastfed until they were about four years old and that all population groups had equal access to food, without distinctions by sex or age. The study was recently published in Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences.

The research was coordinated by UAB researchers Assumpció Malgosa and Carlos Tornero, who is also linked to the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES-CERCA).

Pau Sureda, researcher at the Institute of Heritage Sciences (INCIPIT-CSIC), and Xavier Jordana, lecturer at the UAB and researcher at the Tissue Repair and Regeneration Laboratory of the University of Vic—Central University of Catalonia (UVic-UCC), as well as Filiana Sotiriadou, student of the UAB master’s degree in Biological Anthropology, also participated.

The study expands knowledge about the diet of the first Balearic population groups, a controversial subject of study. It confirms a mixed diet based on plants, with cereals such as wheat, and meat from goat and sheep herds, with little consumption of marine resources, and reinforces previous studies carried out at other Menorcan sites.

“Contrary to what has been seen in other settlements of the same period in Formentera or Mallorca, the consumption of marine food resources would have been occasional in these individuals,” says Carlos Tornero, Ramón y Cajal researcher in the UAB Department of Prehistory.

The research also contributes to the debate on the emergence and development of the first complex societies in the archipelago.

“These societies emerged and developed on the Balearic Islands during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, between 3,600 and 2,600 years ago, including the Naviform (present in all the islands) and Talayotic (only in Mallorca and Menorca) cultures,” explains Pau Sureda, researcher at INCIPIT-CSIC.

But the fact that all the population groups had the same access to food would indicate that these Menorcan groups were socially egalitarian, without the hierarchical organizations or population units differentiated by their social function or economic resources typical of more complex societies.

“Our results are consistent with previous studies of different Menorcan settlements and with paleodemographic and taphonomic studies carried out on individuals from the Cova des Pas, which found no differences in life expectancy or treatment of burials,” says Assumpció Malgosa, lecturer of Physical Anthropology at the UAB and director of the Biological Anthropology Research Group (GREAB-UAB).

The research was conducted using the combined analysis of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in samples of collagen from the skeletal remains of the individuals, which made it possible to identify the consumption of plant and animal foods from land and water, as well as in samples of faunal remains from the Son Mercer de Baix site, the closest site physically and temporally to the necropolis, to reconstruct the food chain and interpret the human data.

New Thoughts on Prehistoric Owl Plaques

Over the past century, thousands of pieces of slate engraved with images of owls have been unearthed from tombs and pits across the Iberian Peninsula, in what’s now Portugal and Spain.

The artifacts date from around 5,000 years ago, and for more than a century their function has flummoxed archaeologists. Many thought they represented goddesses and primarily served a ritual purpose.

Findings from new research published Thursday, however, suggest a more prosaic function: They were toys made and used by children.

Víctor Díaz Núñez de Arenas, the study coauthor and researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid’s department of art history, said the engravings’ informal appearance made the team doubt they were exclusively ritual objects. Plus, many of them were found in homes and other archaeological sites that did not have a clearly ritual context.

To test the idea that they were instead toys, the research team examined 100 of the slate plaques, documenting which particular owl traits were featured in the engraving — feathery tufts, patterned feathers, a flat facial disk, a beak, and wings.

The researchers then compared them with 100 images of owls drawn earlier this year by children ages 4 to 13 at an elementary school in southwestern Spain. The students were asked by their teacher to sketch an owl in less than 20 minutes, with no further instructions.

“The similarity of these plaques with the drawings made by children of our days is very remarkable,” Díaz Núñez de Arenas said via email. “One of the things that they reveal to us about the children of that time is that their vision of what an owl is (is) very similar, if not identical, to what children of today have.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how prehistoric children would have played with the owls, he said, but many of the slates have perforations that could have allowed kids to insert real feathers at the top, Díaz Núñez de Arenas said.

In addition to play, engraving the owls could have helped children learn a valuable prehistoric skill.

“The engraving of these plaques provided the youngest with an activity with which to learn the handling of the different techniques of carving and engraving of the stone, essential for the realization of other objects, such as knives or points of arrow used for functional tasks of daily life. It could even be a way to detect and select the most skilled members of the community for stone carving,” he said.

Díaz Núñez de Arenas said the slate owls could have also played a ritual role, perhaps allowing children to participate in community ceremonies such as burials, offering their toys or dolls as a tribute to deceased loved ones.

Archaeologist Dr. Brenna Hassett, a research associate at University College London who was not involved in the study, agreed that many ancient objects described as ritual might have multiple purposes and uses. She said that not enough was known about how children played in prehistory, and that it remains a relatively understudied field.

“We have to remember that many things would have been made of perishable materials — such as string and fur and wood — so that is one of the reasons it is so rare to find something that is unmistakably a ‘toy,'” said Hassett, author of the 2022 book “Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood.”

The plaques aren’t the oldest known potential toys in the archaeological record. Díaz Núñez de Arenas said animal figures found in children’s graves in Siberia dated to around 20,000 years old have been interpreted as toys, while Hassett said spinners or thaumatropes found in French caves dating back to around 36,000 years ago are thought by some to be toys.

The journal Scientific Reports published the research on Thursday.

Early Dog Identified in Spain’s Basque Country

A humerus analyzed by the UPV/EHU’s Human Evolutionary Biology group belonged to a specimen that lived in the Paleolithic period, 17,000 years ago.

The dog is the first species domesticated by humans, although the geographical and temporal origin of wolf domestication remains a matter of debate. In an excavation led by Jesus Altuna in the Erralla cave (Zestoa, Gipuzkoa) in 1985 an almost complete humerus was recovered from a canid, a family of carnivores that includes wolves, dogs, foxes and coyotes, among others.

At that time it was difficult to identify which species of canid it belonged to.

Now the Human Evolutionary Biology team at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), led by Professor Conchi de la Rúa, has carried out an in-depth study of the bone remains.

A morphological, radiometric and genetic analysis has enabled the species to be identified genetically as Canis lupus familiaris (domestic dog).

The direct dating of the humerus by means of carbon-14 using particle accelerator mass spectrometry gives it an age of 17,410–17,096 cal. BP, (calibrated years Before the Present, i.e. the results obtained are adjusted to take into account changes in the global concentration of radiocarbon over time). That means that the Erralla dog lived in the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic, which makes it one of the most ancient domestic dogs to have existed so far in Europe.

The Erralla dog shares the mitochondrial lineage with the few Magdalenian dogs analyzed so far.

The origin of this lineage is linked to a period of cold climate coinciding with the Last Glacial Maximum, which occurred in Europe around 22,000 years ago.

“These results raise the possibility that wolf domestication occurred earlier than proposed until now, at least in western Europe, where the interaction of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers with wild species, such as the wolf, may have been boosted in areas of glacial refuge (such as the Franco-Cantabrian) during this period of the climate crisis,” explained Conchi de la Rúa, head of the Human Evolutionary Biology group.

Iron Age Artifact May Shed Light on Origins of Basque Language

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.

Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.

Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it to be both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited parts of northern Spain before the arrival of the Romans, and whose language is thought to have been an ancestor of modern-day Basque, or euskera.

Until now, scholars had supposed the Vascones had no proper written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.

The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.

Javier Velaza, a professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona and one of the experts who deciphered the hand, said the discovery had finally confirmed the existence of a written Vasconic language.

“People spoke the language of the Vascones in the area where the inscriptions were found,” he said.

“We had imagined that to be the case but until now, we had hardly any texts to bear that out. Now we do – and we also know that the Vascones used writing to set down their language … This inscription is incontrovertible; the first word of the text is patently a word that’s found in modern Basque.”

Velaza’s colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European linguistics at the University of the Basque country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.

“This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now,” he said. “We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins.”

According to Mattin Aiestaran, the director of the Irulegi dig, the site owes its survival to the fact that the original village was burned and then abandoned during the Sertorian war between two rival Roman factions in the first century BC. The objects they left behind were buried in the ruins of their mud-brick houses.

“That’s a bit of luck for archaeologists and it means we have a snapshot of the moment of the attack,” said Aiestaran. “That means we’ve been able to recover a lot of day-to-day material from people’s everyday lives. It’s an exceptional situation and one that has allowed us to find an exceptional piece.”

Despite the excitement surrounding the deciphering of the inscription, Velaza counselled calm study rather than giddy conjecture. After all, he added, the hand hails from one particular moment in time and tells us only that the people in the area then spoke and wrote the Vasconic language.

“That doesn’t mean we know how long they’d been there, nor what their future was after that moment,” he said.

“It’s true that this is an extraordinarily important text but I’d urge a bit of caution about using it to extrapolate too many conclusions about what happened afterwards. But linguistically speaking, it’s going to provide linguists who specialise in the Vasconic language and Proto-Basque with something they haven’t had until now.”

He added: “I think we should be excited – but we should still be very rigorous scientifically speaking.”

Not every recent Basque language discovery has lived up to its billing. Two years ago, a Spanish archaeologist was found guilty of faking finds that included pieces of third-century pottery engraved with one of the first depictions of the crucified Christ, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Basque words that predated the earliest known written examples of the language by 600 years.

Although the archaeologist, Eliseo Gil, claimed the pieces would “rewrite the history books”, an expert committee examined them and found traces of modern glue as well as references to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.