One of the only guides to the prehistoric archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula that engages with key anthropological and archaeological debates.

Over the past twenty years, archaeological research in Spain and Portugal has undergone profound changes in theoretical orientation, changes that parallel the political and social transformations in those countries over the past generation. These Proceedings of the First International Conference in America on Iberian Archaeology demonstrate the increasingly strong implantation of processualist approaches and their useful integration with historicist orientations. Contributions ranging from the Neolithic to the Iron Age provide a representative sample of the current state of archaeological research in Iberia.

For many archaeologists, Iberia is the last great unknown region in Europe. Although it occupies a crucial position between South-Western Europe and North Africa, academic attention has traditionally been focused on areas like Greece or Italy. However Iberia has an equally rich cultural heritage and archaeological tradition. This ground-breaking volume presents a sample of the ways in which archaeologists have applied theoretical frameworks to the interpretation of archaeological evidence, offering new insights into the archaeology of both Iberia and Europe from prehistoric time through to the tenth century. The contributors to this book are leading archaeologists drawn from both countries. They offer innovative and challenging models for the Paleolithic, Neolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Early Medieval and Islamic periods. A diverse range of subjects are covered including urban transformation, the Iron Age peoples of Spain, observations on historiography and the origins of the Arab domains of Al-Andalus. It is essential reading for advanced undergraduates and those researching the archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula.

"In this book, Katina Lillios provides an up-to-date synthesis of the rich histories of the peoples who lived on the Iberian Peninsula between 1,400,000 (the Paleolithic) and 3500 years ago (the Bronze Age) as revealed in their art, burials, tools, and monuments. She highlights the exciting new discoveries on the Peninsula, including the evidence for some of the earliest hominins in Europe, Neanderthal art, interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, and relationships to peoples living in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and western Europe. This is the first book to relate the ancient history of the Peninsula to broader debates in anthropology and archaeology. Amply illustrated and written in an accessible style, it will be of interest to archaeologists and students of prehistoric Spain and Portugal"--

During the first millennium BCE, complex encounters of Phoenician and Greek colonists with natives of the Iberian Peninsula transformed the region and influenced the entire history of the Mediterranean. One of the first books on these encounters to appear in English, this volume brings together a multinational group of contributors to explore ancient Iberia’s colonies and indigenous societies, as well as the comparative study of colonialism. These scholars—from a range of disciplines including classics, history, anthropology, and archaeology—address such topics as trade and consumption, changing urban landscapes, cultural transformations, and the ways in which these issues played out in the Greek and Phoenician imaginations. Situating ancient Iberia within Mediterranean colonial history and establishing a theoretical framework for approaching encounters between colonists and natives, these studies exemplify the new intellectual vistas opened by the engagement of colonial studies with Iberian history.

The first work to address the end of Roman Hispania and the emergence of Medieval Spain from a principally archaeological perspective

The Iberians inhabited southern and eastern Spain between the Greek and Phoenician colonisation, beginning in the eighth century BC, and the Roman conquest. This was a period of significant changes in native Spanish societies, and the emergence of urbanism and the adoption of ideological symbols and technological innovations from the colonists created an important and unique Iron Age culture. In this 1998 book, Arturo Ruiz and Manuel Molinos offer the first synthesis of the period for more than thirty years, and cover a number of topics: ways in which material culture can help to explain cultural change, ethnicity, and ethnic conflict, and the decline of the Iberian world following the Punic Wars and Roman colonization. The result is a sophisticated, theoretically informed case study of cultural change within a specific complex society.