A multidisciplinary team of scientists discovered what may be the largest animal sacrifice performed during a ritual in the western Mediterranean about 2,500 years ago, at Casas del Turuñuelo, in today’s Spanish region of Badajoz.
This discovery reveals new data on Tartessian culture and Iron Age European societies, the Efe agency reported.
Researchers from the Institute of Archeology of Mérida (High Council for Scientific Research-Junta de Extremadura), the Valencian Institute for Conservation, Restoration and Research, the Universities of Jaén, Extremadura, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Córdoba or Lleida, and the specialists from the centers in Anthropobiology and Genomics at Toulouse and Paul Sabatier University in France.
This work, whose conclusions were published this Wednesday in the journal Plos One, reveals that the residents of the Casas de Turuñuelo building performed a unique ritual in the courtyard, considered by researchers to be “an archaeological jewel” from the 5th century BC , and Since its discovery in 2014, it reports vast knowledge about Tartessian culture.
The researchers analyzed nearly 7,000 bones from 52 animals sacrificed and buried in three stages, mainly adult horses, but also cattle, pigs and a dog, and found that the skeletons were complete and unchanged in the first stages, but later – except for the horses – signs that they have been processed for food.
They checked and showed that this space was used repeatedly over several years for sacrificial rituals whose practices and purposes varied, concluding that this may have been the largest animal sacrifice discovered in the western Mediterranean during the First Iron Age.
The results show that this mass sacrifice was part of a series of rituals performed in the building’s final years until its abandonment, when it was deliberately sealed under a mound with a diameter of 90 meters and six meters high, explained researchers Sebastián Celestino and Esther Rodríguez, directors of the excavations and scientists from the Mérida Archaeological Institute.
The Casas del Turuñuelo site, located in the Las Vegas Altas del Guadiana region, is – together with other archaeological spaces in Badajoz (those of “Cancho Roano” and “Cerro Borreguero”, in Zalamea de la Serena) – part of the scientific complex “Tartessian Building” project that aims to characterize the Tartessian culture through the analysis of the large mudbrick buildings excavated and analyzed in recent decades.
Sebastián Celestino appreciated the importance of this site and the knowledge it offers to researchers and society, assuring Efe that this is mainly due to its excellent state of conservation, which helps to understand the construction techniques that until now were thought they had reached the peninsula. until the Roman conquest, as is the case with the vault or lime mortar.
The co-director of the excavations explained that the mass sacrifice of animals coincides with the end of the building’s occupation, so the ritual would be related to the depreciation and closure of these great monuments “and would coincide with the end of culture in de’ Central Guadiana”.
The ritual was complex, but always the same: community banquet, animal sacrifices, setting fire to the building, filling the entire interior space and finally sealing it with a layer of clay, he specified.
The scientist explained that the building’s inhabitants offered their most prized possessions to the gods, with the horse subsequently positioned as one of the animals with the greatest social prestige.
Source: DN
