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A two-story building burned to the ground over 2,000 years ago in the Pyrenees mountains in northeastern Spain. The Inferno consumed the wooden structure, located in an Iron Age settlement, killing six animals that were in the stable.
The fate of the people who used the building is unknown, but details of their lives are preserved in a handful of scorched clues, including pieces of pottery, tools for textile work and a metal pickax, recently discovered by archaeologists.
They also found one valuable object: gold earrings 0.8 inches (2 centimeters) long and 0.8 inches wide. It was hidden inside a small jar hidden in a wall, possibly to keep it safe from the hypothetical marauders who set the fire, according to the study published Friday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
The location of the settlement is called Tossal de Baltarga, and thousands of years ago, a community of Iberian people called the Cerretani occupied the village. This group preceded the Roman occupation of Iberia and left their mark on the region in mountain rock carvings. However, researchers are still gathering clues about Cerretani’s life, including the meanings of these carvings, said lead study author Dr. Oriol Olesti Vila, associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain.
Scientists have discovered several burnt buildings at Tossal de Baltarga since 2011, all from the third century BC. Archaeologists have recently excavated a multi-purpose non-residential structure known as Building G, the best-preserved building on the site. It measured about 26 feet (8 meters) long by about 7 feet (2 meters) wide, and its contents provide an unprecedented insight into the life of Cerretani in Iron Age Iberia.
But the blackened ruins also preserve a darker story. The destruction of the entire settlement by fire suggests that the fire was deliberately set. And the chronology of the fire suggests that the arsonists may have been an invasion weapon under Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who led troops against the Roman Republic and crossed the Pyrenees around this time, during the Second Punic War ( 218 BC to 201 BC), the researchers wrote in the study.
Lifestyle tips
Although the upper floor of Building G collapsed when the support beams burned, it retained traces of its former structure, with mud bricks in the eastern part of the floor and stone in the western part. One explanation is that the upper floor was divided into two separate spaces used for different tasks, the scientists said.
More than 1,000 pottery fragments from the upper floor belonged to a variety of vessels, used for cooking, eating, drinking and storage. Eight cooking vessels were almost finished when they were found, and chemical analysis showed that they contained organic residues: animal fats, dairy products and plants. The designs of some vessels indicated that they were obtained from another Iberian region through trade. More than a dozen loom weights and spindles told the researchers that the building’s occupants were spinning and weaving with wool.
In the stable, the scientists found the remains of a horse, four sheep and a goat. The horse was kept in a separate stall, and charred particles revealed a variety of local grasses and plants as well as cultivated grain, stored there for livestock feed.
The presence of a horse in the stable suggested that these people were richer than some of their neighbors, said Olesti Vila.
“In ancient times, horses were not the typical animal of a typical peasant family,” because they were expensive to feed and were not kept for their meat or milk, said Olesti Vila.
“In general, horses are associated with the elite.”
This finding gave archaeologists another important clue about the social structure of ancient Iberia, introducing the possibility of an “aristocrat” class, the authors of the study wrote.
A moment in time
Their finds reflect the lifestyles of the Cerretani, showing textile work and the use of agriculture and natural resources. Analysis of the hidden cache revealed traces of silver mixed with local gold, indicating that the Cerretani were also familiar with metalworking.
Such “moment in time” revelations are exceptional in the archaeological record, said Dr. Bettina Arnold, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who was not involved in the research. The site provides important insights into the daily lives of Iron Age Iberian populations in the Pyrenees at this critical time in history, Arnold said in an email.
“The most remarkable feature of the excavation of Building G is the range of scientific analyzes carried out on the finds found there, which show a community that was self-sufficient in a number of production activities, such as spinning and wool weaving,” Arnold said.
However, the analysis also showed that this community was part of a larger regional exchange network “through trade and probably bonds of obligation,” linking them to the Iberian tribal leadership, she said.
A fatal attack
The fact that the animals died inside the stable gave the researchers another clue about the horrific circumstances of the fire.
During the Iron Age, when people lived in wooden houses heated by fires, buildings were often burnt down by accident. But if there was such a fire, the owners of the animals would probably open the stable doors to save their livestock, said Olesti Vila.
They would also probably have returned after the fire had died down to find their hidden treasure – the gold ring hidden in a croc.
“This is also an indication of some kind of conflict or some kind of violent attack,” said Olesti Vila. Scientists suspected that the community might have been caught up in the Second Punic War and Hannibal’s crossing, “because of the chronology and the context,” but because the exact date of the fire is unknown, this link is only a hypothesis, said he.
In fact, the violent raids between Iron Age populations in Europe, with raiding bands making off with valuables, livestock and even people, “are good from an archeological point of view,” Arnold said, “and not necessarily related with a specific historical event as. Hannibal’s campaigns.”
Mindy Weisberger is a science writer and media producer whose work has appeared in Live Science, Scientific American and How It Works magazine.
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