The Rise of the Iberians: From Neolithic Revolution to Complex Societies

Before doing the Americas, what was really fashionable was doing the Hispanias. Or the Iberias, which was the nickname in Greek. There was no son of a Phoenician or grandson of Ulysses who would not be interested in an Erasmus scholarship in the peninsula. You see how the story changes from one week to the next. We leave Homo Tarraconensis playing flintstones and find him now paying the mortgage on his semi-detached hut in a village with a double armored wall and burglar alarm. What happened then? Those who believe in referee help will say that it was the hand of God – Maradona’s, I mean. For the rest, surely, a mixture of chance, necessity and the Azores anticyclone. I mean the weather was already in place, right after sports. And the beasts were no longer scary crowded together in Rioleón Safari.

Welcome to the Neolithic!, the first media revolution in History. Young people from the Fertile Crescent burning containers under the same motto: ‘Hunting is going to end.’ It is not that all of them were sympathizers of the animalist party (or not all, at least), what happens is that agriculture and grazing had been born, and with them, a sedentary life, sky-high cholesterol and spelled bread.

But let’s get back to our point. Here, in this part of the map (between Vandellòs and Garraf, with the Prades mountains in the background), some Iberians who we will call, in a familiar tone, Cosetans or Cesetans, had made their fortune, guys who took advantage of any hill on the banks of a river or on the seafront to set up their citadels. The capital of that troop was Tarrakon, Kesse or Cissis; for tastes, the toponymy. Consider that the alphabet, brought by the Phoenicians, was still in a testing period, so the street alphabet was a crossword puzzle. And Greco-Latin travel guides don’t help either. Over there, the mythical Calípolis appears through the mists. Then, to make matters worse, we have the issue of numismatics. Yes, gentlemen, there was already some change. Of course, each coin with its face and its cross, imagine the mess. It seems, despite everything, that that Tarrakon, Kesse, or whatever the creature was properly called, was located, up the street and down the street, between Caputxins, Gasòmetre, Sevilla, Eivissa, Pere Martell, Jaume I and Zamenhof of the current Tarragona. And we say it seems, because when it comes to Iberians you never know which ditch the Bonoloto is going to hit.

What we do know, broadly speaking, is that those distant cousins ​​were lovers of the Mediterranean diet and war films. In the town of Olèrdola, in the Alt Penedès, the Museu d’Arqueologia de Catalunya has found the skull of an individual, supposedly an enemy, whose severed head was displayed like a Champions League. We are talking, of course, about communities governed by military aristocracies. And where there is an army, there is a leader. But it wasn’t all Rambo movies. On daily days the Cossetans also had a shop for commerce. The evidence of that bustle is palpable in any site. There you have, for example, El Vilar, in Valls; Les Masies de Sant Miquel, in Banyeres del Penedès; Darró, in Vilanova i la Geltrú; or Alorda Park, in Calafell, perhaps the most educational. For the first time, a certain feeling of ownership and belonging to the group emerged, ingredients that, well precooked, already gave nationalist benefits to the chiefs in power. If we add to that that around this date the sickle was invented more or less, which was added to other previous tools such as the hammer, we already have the symptoms of any complex society. Rome is just around the corner. Next up is the Seat Tarraco, but we’ll talk about seven-seater vehicles another time. (To be continued).