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.