Archaeology 3 (Investigation of the Argaric society)

Research of the Argaric Society

The research done by the Siret brothers at the end of the 19th century, demostrate a coincidence in time of various settlements located in the provinces of Almería and Murcia. Taken the name from one of the archaeological sites located in front of Antas, they call El Argar to this society and the historic period in which is developed.

It is then, when Luis Siret formulates the hypothesis that the formation of the Argar is the result of a wave of immigrants from central Europe with celtic origins. On the contrary, in 1947, Julio Martínez Santa-Olalla proposes an Mediterranean origin from Turkey and Greece.

In regards to the idea that the whole argaric area is extended throughout the Iberian Peninsula, Manuel Tarradell (1947), refuses this hypothesis, and proposes that El Argar has is limited to the provinces of Almería, Granada and Murcia and the adjacent regions of Albacete, Alicante and Jaen. In 1954, Pedro Bosch Gimpera sees in El Argar the result of the evolution of the native population of Almería.

In the seventies and eighties, new proposals come out (Beatrice Blance, Robert W Chapman, Antonio Gilman and Clay Mathers), that stoke up the debate on the argaric society. Since then many teams research in the Southeast. Fuente Alamo is a constant reference and the team on the excavation is The German Archaeological Institute of Madrid, under the direction of Hermanfrid Schubart, Volker Pingel and Oswaldo Arteaga.

In 1983, Vicente Lull crates a system for the argaric world from a social history perspective, giving a new impulse to the archaeological studies of the Southeast. Shortly after, he iniciates the digginigs in Gatas (Turre) with the team of the Autónoma University of Barcelona.

Outside the Almería region the archaeological sites that stand out, are the ones of Cerro de la Encina (Monachil), Cuesta del Negro (Purullena), Castellón Alto (Galera) in Granada, and Peña Losa (Baños de la Encina), en Jaén. The team that works in all these sites is the one from the University of Granada.