COMPLEX SOCIETIES IN COPPER AND BRONZE AGE IBERIA: A REAPPRAISAL

Abstract

Summary This paper starts from the conviction that it is not only important to study long‐term processes of change in a particular area, but to analyse the extent to which other areas have been implicated and affected by the processes occurring in it. The study of the emergence, maintenance and even disappearance of social complexity in the Iberian Peninsula during the Copper and Bronze Age has lacked such an approach. As a result, on the one hand it seemed that South‐east Spain and Portuguese Estremadura, the two areas where it was argued complexity first appeared, were isolated from each other and from the rest of the Peninsula during the Chalcolithic, and on the other, changes in the geographical distribution of complex societies in the Bronze Age had not been explained. This article reassesses these arguments and aims to show that it was not only intrinsical factors which provoked the social changes which took place in the various areas during the Chalcolithic and Bronze Age. Extrinsic factors were on occasion as if not more important. In addition, new data published in recent years has been used to give a broader picture of the expansion of complex societies in the Iberian Peninsula.

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