The origin and early development of social stratification is essentially an archaeological problem. The impressive advance of archaeological research has revealed that, first and foremost, the pre-eminence of stratified or class society in today’s world is the result of a long social struggle. This volume advances the archaeological study of social organisation in Prehistory, and more specifically the rise of social complexity in European Prehistory. Within the wider context of world Prehistory, in the last 30 years the subject of early social stratification and state formation has been a key subject on interest in Iberian Prehistory. This book illustrates the differing forms of resistances, the interplay between change and continuity, the multiple paths to and from social complexity, and the ‘failures’ of states to form in Prehistory. It also engages with broader questions, such as: when did social stratification appear in western European Prehistory? What factors contributed to its emergence and consolidation? What are the relationships between the notions of social complexity, social inequality, social stratification and statehood? And what are the archaeological indicators for the empirical analysis of these issues? Focusing on Iberia, but with a permanent connection to the wider geographical framework, this book presents, for the first time, a chronologically comprehensive, up-to-date approach to the issue of state formation in prehistoric Europe.

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

This book charts a thousand years of Spanish history from the tenth century BC to the Roman conquest. In recent years, the archaeological data on the first millennium BC in Spain have significantly changed our understanding of the period. Drawing extensively on this research, the author examines how during this period Spain gradually changed from a country of similar economic standing to the rest of Bronze Age Europe to a region opened up through its growing contacts with the more advanced Eastern Mediterranean and transformed into one of the western classical cultures. Iberia in Prehistory charts the increase in the Atlantic metal trade during the Bronze Age and the diverse cultural interchanges between the different regions in Spain. The book then looks at the "Tartessic Culture" and the influence of both Phoenician colonists and Greek merchants. Finally, the author examines the development of Iberian cultures during the period 500-280 BC. During this period a strong hellenic influence flourished in the south and east, but the author shows that the differences between "civilized" Iberia and the rest of the country were very strong.

At the heart of Emerging Complexity is the thesis that complex societies developed independently during the Copper and Bronze Ages in south-east Spain.

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 symposium "Prehistoric Iberia: genetics, anthropology and linguistics" was held in the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid on 16th -17th November 1998. The idea was bringing together specialists who could address not clearly resolved historic and prehistoric issues regarding ancient Iberian and Mediterranean populations, following a multidisciplinary approach. This was necessary in the light of the new bulk of genetic, archeological and linguistic data obtained with the new DNA technology and the recent discoverings in the other fields. Genes may now be easily studied in populations, particularly HLA genes and markers of the mitochondrial DNA and the Y chromosome. Basques, Iberians, North Africans, Berbers (Imazighen) and Mediterraneans have presently been widely studied. The genetic emerging picture is that Mediterraneans are closely related from West (Basque, Iberians, Berbers) to East (Jews, Lebanese, Cretans); however, Greeks are outliers in all the analyses done by using HLA genes. Anthropologists and archeologists showed how there was no people substitution during the revolutionary Mesolithic-Neolithic transition; in addition, cultural relationships were found between Iberia and predinastic Egypt (EI Badari culture). Basque language translation into Spanish has been the key for relating most Mediterranean extinct languages. The Usko-Mediterranean languages were once spoken in a wide African and European area, which also included parts of Asia. This was the "old language" that was slowly substituted by Eurasian languages starting approximately after the Bronze Age (or 2,000 years BC).

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.