It is one of the delights of visiting new places that you sometimes find an entirely unexpected archaeological site, which gives you an insight that is entirely new. And this is what happened when Andrew Selkirk visited Barcelona and discovered that there is, in fact, a Roman Barcelona. Barcelona is not normally considered to be […]
Spain
A 5,000-year-old mystery: recording rock art within the Dolmen de Soto
Investigating an isolated Neolithic tomb in Andalucía has revealed a new dimension to its rock art. What can this tell us about life as well as death in a remarkable megalithic monument?
Travel: Discovering Spain
Launching the Palarq Award CWA’s editor-in-chief Andrew Selkirk takes us behind the scenes of a new archaeological award ‘Would you like to be a judge for a new Spanish archaeological award?’ I was asked. ‘The judging will be held in Barcelona, the award will be presented in Madrid, and we will fly you out and […]
Tartesssos wins prize
The excavations at Tartessos have won the Palarq award, the most valuable prize in Spanish archaeology. Andrew Selkirk, the Editor-in-chief of CWA, who was one of the judging panel, says that the award, of €80,000, established by Spanish philanthropist Antonio Gallardo Ballart, will enable the excavation of the new site of Turuñuelo to explore the […]
Beyond the Pillars of Hercules – Excavating an Iron Age seat of power
A new discovery deep in the Guadiana Valley of the Iberian Peninsula is revealing the secrets of a little-known and intriguing Iron Age civilisation. Sebastián Celestino Pérez and Esther Rodríguez González tell CWA about the latest finds from a political powerhouse: the kingdom of Tartessos. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian and geographer […]
FILM REVIEW: Finding Altamira
Paul Bahn sifts fact from fiction in the silverscreen telling of an extraordinary discovery. Rarely does a true archaeological story become the basis of a movie. Yet this is what we have with Finding Altamira. It recounts the discovery in 1879 of Ice Age art on a cave ceiling at Altamira, provoking intense and acrimonious […]
Travel: Las Eretas
Jules Stewart travels to the little-known site of an early Iron Age community in the Navarre region of northern Spain. Las Eretas was never meant to be on the beaten path. On the contrary, its inhabitants were determined to distance themselves as far as possible from hostile neighbours. Visitors should therefore not be discouraged by […]
Richard Hodges travels to the Basque Country
Richard Hodges explores the history and archaeology of the Spanish Basque Country.
Toothy Roman Tumour
Archaeologists examining the 1,600 year-old remains of a woman from Roman Spain have made a unique – if grisly – discovery: a calcified ovarian tumour containing four teeth and a piece of bone. Known as a ‘teratoma’, the spherical mass measured 4.3cm (1.7in) in diameter and was found in the right-hand part of the 30-40 […]
No Neanderthal Neighbours?
Neanderthals might have died out 15,000 years earlier than previously thought, meaning that they could not have interacted or interbred with modern humans, new analysis suggests. For 20 years it had been thought that pockets of Neanderthals survived in southern Iberia until c.36,000 years ago. As Homo sapiens arrived in the northern part of the […]
Not Slow Progress
Prehistoric snail shells contain a wealth of information about what the climate was like thousands of years ago, newly-published research says. Chemical analysis led by Dr André Carlo Colonese, Dept of Archaeology, University of York, examined the carbon and oxygen isotope composition of the shells of Pomatias elegans, recovered from Mediterranean caves and ranging in […]
Recycling ideas
Recycling is no modern concept: our ancestors were putting old tools to new uses 13,000 years ago, archaeologists in Spain have discovered. In the first study of its kind, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, researchers examined the unusually high number of re-worked burnt tools found at Molí del Salt in Tarragona. Manuel Vaquero, […]
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