Assessing Political Development in Copper and Bronze Age Southeast Spain

Abstract

Southeast Spain (Figure 4.1) has yielded a rich and distinctive later prehistoric cultural succession. Its essential features were defined over a century ago by the brothers Henri and Louis Siret, Belgian mining engineers in charge of the operations in the Sierra Almagrera in the province Almería. Their classic workLes Premiers Ages du Metal dans le Sud-est Espagnol (Siret and Siret, 1887), and Louis Siret’s continuing work in the region until his death in 1934, provided the basic corpus of information and the overall intellectual approach that informed the writing of the later prehistory of Spain until the 1970s. Within this framework the increasing social complexity exhibited by the sequence in southeast Spain was the product of diffusion from the eastern Mediterranean. In the past 25 years, this sequence has been reinterpreted from a variety of functionalist perspectives as a process of autochthonous evolution. The debates concerning the causes of this development illustrate the challenges involved in assessing prehistoric economic and political institutions.