Valencina, the monumental complex led by women 5,000 years ago

The society of the Chalcolithic period, or the Copper Age, has always been very complicated to study because until a few years ago there were only collections of human resources from which to approach its demography and social organization. However, the improvement in the availability of evidence and technical advances that have been applied to the megasite of Valencina in the Spanish city of Seville, of more than 400 hectares, have radically changed the panorama.

Now, professor of prehistory at the University of Seville, Leonardo García Sanjuán, and anthropologist Timothy Earle, from the Department of Archeology at Northwestern University in the United States, have managed to reconstruct with greater precision the social and political context of this period of prehistory on the Iberian Peninsula.

During this time, enormous “monumentalized central places emerged that attracted large contingents of people, probably thousands,” and from where “distinctive female leadership emerged at Valencina as materialized by identities supported by sumptuary objects made on exotic raw materials and produced by specialists” appeared, as detailed in their study Valencina: A Copper Age Polity, published by the scientific magazine Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. This spectacular “social world built around Valencina as a monumentalised central place came to a rather abrupt end c. 2300, after which a different social medium, the Bronze Age, was started.”

Between 3200 and 2200 B.C., the Iberian Peninsula experienced a crucial historical period known as the Copper Age. During this era, a social organization emerged for the first time that revolved around large monuments, “largely (but not only) in the form of megaliths and ditched enclosures, [which] brought people together, creating and maintaining a sense of belonging and cooperation,” according to the study.

Five thousand years ago, Valencina dominated the mouth of the Guadalquivir River which, at that time, ended in a large marina bay in the Atlantic Ocean. It found itself, therefore, in a privileged geographical location between Europe and Africa, at a time when long-distance exchange increased across Eurasia, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. Valencina was a contemporary of important sites such as Los Millares (Santa Fe de Mondújar, Spain) and Stonehenge in England.

Between 1860 and 1918, the first Valencinan tholos (funerary constructions with a wide corridor and circular chambers) were discovered, although it was not until 2010 that research on this enormous site took off. Since then, several scientific articles have boosted its international visibility. The scale and uniqueness of Valencina make it the “largest prehistoric site in Iberia and one of the largest in Europe,” at over 400 hectares, although its scale could reach as many as 900.

The site houses “dozens of megalithic constructions, ditches, hypogea (”artificial caves") and shafts, as well as tens of thousands of shallow basins and pits.” The megalithic monuments and graves are quite notable and include those, such as Montelirio, La Pastora, and Matarrubilla that have corridors of between 30 and 40 meters long and chambers up to five meters wide, with terracotta vaults or canopies between 2.5 and 4.5 meters high. Some ditches are between nine and 10 meters wide and the same depth. “Geophysics carried out over the last 10 years on the northern and southern edges of the site,” the experts noted, “suggest some may have been hundreds of meters long (or even several miles), perhaps forming impressive concentric enclosures.”

Valencina also stands out for its sumptuary objects, sometimes unique, which are mainly found in direct association with individual burials, such as La Dama del Marfil (The Ivory Lady, so called because of the rich trousseau with which she was buried), or with extraordinary individual garments, worn by the powerful women of Montelirio, deposited in a collective burial.

“The skills deployed in the manufacture of these remarkable sumptuary and prestigious artifacts are impressive. They include unparalleled ivory carving, a series of exceptional long-barbed mylonite arrowheads, elaborate rock-crystal objects including unparalleled dagger blade and arrowheads, amber beads and figurines, complex attires made with tens of thousands of marine shell beads, a sophisticated and, most likely, sacred, gold sheet decorate with four ‘oculi’ motifs, intensive use of cinnabar, as well as many copper artifacts, including several spearheads, for which very few analogues exist in Iberia,” the study notes.

The extraordinary value and uniqueness of this constellation of exuberant material culture was intended, in part, to mark and distinguish certain individuals and to celebrate the shared worldview. What has been studied in Valencina can help to understand the processes that led its inhabitants to create an early social complexity, but not to the point of forming a state.

The two professors believe, therefore, that Valencina was a political, religious and economic system that attracted labor for the construction of monuments, and that acted as a market and place of provisioning, centralizing the production of certain artisanal goods, as well as import and export, through all of which they benefited from the ideological and religious capital that was concentrated in the sanctuaries or temples they erected. “This would be a balanced staple-financed (the traditional Neolithic pattern supporting ceremonial elaboration) and wealth-financed (new maritime trade and specialized manufacture) polity, both likely supported by staple mobilization and religious prestige,” the researchers say.

According to the hypothesis proposed in the study, before cities and states emerged, central places like Valencina served to give cohesion to society, articulating its political and religious organization, with the construction of monuments fulfilling a vital role. “The construction of these enormous monuments led to a lot of expense, which consumed the agricultural surplus that these communities produced”, explains García Sanjuán. Basically, therefore, according to this proposal, late-day and Chalcolithic monumentalism constituted a system of “burning” (large-scale consumption) of surpluses to prevent them from falling into the hands of leaders or voracious elites and creating acute social inequalities.

In Valencina, around 3000 B.C., geostrategic, geographic, and demographic conditions combined to allow the development of “a strong material cultural personality, as well as forms of leadership that were not found anywhere else in its time.”

The power exercised by its — mainly female — leaders was unstable and, to a certain extent, fragile. Valencina’s climactic moment occurred between 2900 and 2650 B.C. From 2350-2300 B.C., “the site experienced an abrupt and sharp decline, and eventually was effectively abandoned.” The second major crisis it suffered was aggravated by the “environmental effects of the so-called 4.2 kiloyear [thousand years] climatic event. This climatic episode, which in the Mediterranean manifested itself by increased aridity and drought, appears to have resulted in concomitant socio-cultural collapse across the macro-region.” Valencina, as a central and attractive place for local and foreign people, no longer existed.

Thus ended the fundamental role of these central monumentalized sites in the Iberian Peninsula after 2,000 years of existence. Eventually, the disappearance of the central Neolithic and Chalcolithic megasites, such as Antequera (Málaga) or Valencina, opened the way for the emergence of a new socio-political world. But that is a different story in the political economy, society and culture of the world. It is known as the Bronze Age.

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