Powerful Bronze Age Women in Spain

“This Looks Like…”

Interpreting archaeological remains can be a subjective process. I’m sometimes more amused than persuaded by how many flat stone surfaces get declared “altars,” for example. And the term “ritual object” covers a multitude of sins, if you ask me.

Powerful Bronze Age Women

But this brief Archaeology Magazine article, “Crowning Glory,” makes a good case for an unusual take on Bronze Age culture. The clues found at the burials of women from the Bronze Age El Argar culture (2200 to 1500 BCE) in southeastern Spain are gently persuasive indicators of the high political status of these women. They appear to outrank the men in burial splendor and “power” symbols. Maybe they played an important role as rulers. Maybe they are examples, like the Hittite Queen Puduhepa who inspires my fiction, of powerful Bronze Age women in a largely patriarchal era.

An Interesting Pair in a Jar Burial

The recent find at the palace site of La Almoloya is a large ceramic jar burial of a man and woman dating to the mid 17th century BCE. The location of the burial inside a formal hall with benches for 50 people points to these two people as rulers. Jar burials under the floors of buildings are also found in Anatolia (my area of interest), although often those are of small children. (Which always breaks my heart to think about the psychology of that tradition.) To us, this may seem like a strange place and style of burial, but it can confer on the space the power and protection of the buried person as they enter the afterlife. Worshipping ancestors and beseeching them for help is found across the ancient world.

Status Symbols

The woman in this recent find is adorned by a silver diadem. (Click through to the article to see the silver diadem and overall site at La Almoloya. The golden diadem in the photo at top is the same shape and also from the Iberian Bronze Age, in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.) Other women, excavated at another El Argar site in the 19th century, also wore similar crowns. Apparently no one buried the men with symbolic headgear. Maybe it was just a fashion statement, but what a person wears on his or her head usually has singular significance in human history. “Crowns” appear across many cultures. I’d love to hear theories about why that is. Maybe it’s simply visibility. The woman’s “lavish array” of gold and silver objects, missing from the man’s burial, strengthens the interpretation of her higher status. The ratio of gold and silver for the male and female burials was apparently similar in the previous excavations.

A Museum Collection of the Iberian Bronze Age

When I spent a full day exploring Madrid’s National Archaeological Museum a few years ago, I was delighted to repair my complete ignorance about the Iberian Bronze Age. The artifacts in that museum collection are exquisite, and the curators have done an excellent job explaining the context of them. This article in Archaeology Magazine about burials of high status women with silver diadems is an intriguing addition to the informal mini-course in the Spanish BA I enjoyed that day.

Visiting the museum, I noticed that certain figurines and motifs looked very similar to ones I know from the Anatolian Bronze Age. There were kindred statuettes like the Hittite small, pointed storm god figurines. I feel certain these two contemporaneous cultures (and many points in between) were part of shared trade routes. Analysis of metals and other traceable materials has shown BA trade routes extending between what are now Spain and Turkey. We think of our world today as newly global, but human life has been far flung for a long time. And apparently, just maybe, some women played a central leadership role in that Bronze Age world I so enjoyed exploring via a good museum.

Here for another post about the MAN museum.