Pithouses or ritual dumps? On Late Bronze and Early Iron Age’s material context type in the South of the Iberian Peninsula. The dump of Cortijo Riquelme (Almería)

• Published in: Zephyrus Vol. 80; pp. 69 - 91
• Main Authors: José Luis LÓPEZ CASTRO, Carmen Ana PARDO BARRIONUEVO, Laura MOYA COBOS
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Spanish
• Published: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 01-12-2017
• Subjects: banquetes rituales; colonización fenicia; contextos de depósito; i milenio a. c; población autóctona; se de iberia
• ISSN: 0514-7336; 2386-3943
• DOI: 10.14201/zephyrus2017806991

Cortijo Riquelme is a Late Bronze and Early Iron Age’s archaeological dump in the South East of the Iberian Peninsula which belongs to the so called pithouses. This traditional interpretation has been rejected by recent critical studies. Following this positions, the paper analyzes the mentioned dump, which mainly contained Late Bronze and very ancient Phoenician imported pottery, showing the introduction of Phoenician wine and the service for its consumption. A comparison is done with other similar dumps distributed in the South of the Iberian peninsula from Late Bronze Age, though the majority are dated during the early centuries if the 1st millennium bc, coinciding with the Phoenician colonization. Another Mediterranean dumps from Crete, Cyprus, Sicily and North Africa related with feasts help to propose an interpretation for the dump of Cortijo Riquelme and others of the same type, in which the ritual deposit of the containers used in feasts should contribute to the formation of dumps, in a context of increasing competition of local elites in processes of social differentiation.