By Museo de Almería
Museo de Almería
This
part of the walk through the permament exhibition in the Museum of
Almeria takes about an hour. Just a reminder that we are always happy
to have you here, and so please feel free to come back to enjoy the
exhibits if you don't have much time right now.
The
first farming and stockbreeding societies (5500 - 3200 BCE)
Upon entering the first floor, we find a room dedicated to the transition from the hunting societies of the Paleolithic to the productive societies of the Neolithic. Through different museum resources you’ll see the emergence of agriculture and livestock, or in other words, the economics of food production.
Quartz Microlith (5500 - 3200 BCE)Museo de Almería
The oldest traces of human settlements in the current area of Almeria can be found at the Zajara group of caves (Cuevas del Almanzora), and they belong to Neanderthal groups. We have absolute dating from a much more recent period, approximately 16,000 years ago, of a Homo sapiens settlement at the Cueva Ambrosio (Vélez Blanco). Groups of hunters and harvesters settled in small temporary camps, and utilised the diversity of resources found in the northern lands.
Storage vessel (4000 - 3000 BCE)Museo de Almería
Between 5500 and 3200 before the Common Era, there was an increase in the population and they tended to concentrate in small villages along all the natural areas of Almeria.
From this period on we begin to see new productive activities, the beginning of agriculture and livestock, storage techniques, and new production tools, such as those made in polished stone and clay vessels.
Such innovations have been included in the period traditionally known as Neolithic.
Fragment of a Bracelet (5000 - 4000 BCE)Museo de Almería
The contacts between human groups served as a vehicle to transfer these novelties, adapting according to their own needs. This process occurred among communities with different levels of sedentary lifestyles, from ephemeral and migrant settlements to more stable ones. In social relationships, the sense of belonging to one family group begun to be dominant, and hence the social predominance of kinship ties.
Storage vessel (4000 - 3000 BCE)Museo de Almería
The first pottery artefacts found date back to this period. Pottery is made of a raw material, clay, which can be found everywhere and which, after being fired at a certain temperature, endures to this day.
This new acquisition brought about an important change in the diet, as it allowed for the cooking and preparation of food. Its invention is linked to the development of food preservation techniques to deal with predators, insects, or mice.
It soon became one of the most used elements in the housework and as grave goods, and hence the importance of its study in archaeology, as a functional, technical and social element.
Chisel (5000 - 4000 BCE)Museo de Almería
The diverse rocks found in the mountains of the area were an invaluable source of local raw materials.
In addition to the traditional techniques carving of stone, bone and seashell (scrapers, rasps, burins and drills, made in silex or flint) new tools are documented. They were elaborated with a polishing technique that provides a new way to get more resistant blades in a wider range of rocks. Axes, adzes and chisels for the use in all the new farming activities such as tree felling and land preparation and small tools called microliths (small blades and geometrics) used exclusively for hunting, and from this period onwards, also used as sickle pieces for reaping.
Anthropomorphic Idol (5500 - 3200 BCE)Museo de Almería
On this period, the practice of wearing ornaments made of bone, shell and stone became popular with the acquisition of a new polishing technique, which was then used to make symbolic objects such as the idols.
At the end of the room, the exhibition discourse is dedicated to funerary customs. Different burial rites coexisted in the southeast of the Iberian Peninsula, both inside and outside the caves.
In southeast Spain at this time, collective burials were carried out inside the settlements themselves such as that at Cerro Virtud. More importantly and especially at the end of that era and during the period of transition, there were also circular tombs built outside the settlements, forming scattered necropolis, like Loma de Almanzora 15 (Cantoria).
Retouched Blade (4000 - 3400 BCE)Museo de Almería
At present, it is considered the precedent of the southeastern megalithic structures, the burial place of a lineage or a large family and its territorial indicator.
The fact that this is a moment of transition is clear from looking at the flint tools. The arrow heads are exceptionally well finished and there are also large flint blades which contrast with the small plates in the central section of the cabinet of the room.
At the far end of the room there are several panels featuring cave art from eastern Spain and in the corridor leading to the room dedicated to Los Millares is another series of panels focusing on schematic cave art, produced around 3000 BCE, and also declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. We share more info on that later.
The
Society of Los Millares (3200 - 2250 BCE)
Starting around 3200 BCE, southeastern Spain experienced a heavy concentration of population growth in large fortified settlements. Of these, the archaeological site of Los Millares is the most important and has served to name the whole time period.
Symbolic model of Los Millares (2006)Museo de Almería
Our intention to understand this period leads to a symbolic model that shows, from an artistic contemporary language, how the territory of the site of Los Millares would be in the third millennium BCE.
In the period between 2700 and 2400 BCE, the society of Los Millares was organised in large fortified settlements which controlled wide areas of southeastern Spain.
Archaeological site of Los Millares (Santa Fe de Mondújar, Almería) (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
Settlements such as Almizaraque (Cuevas del Almanzora), Los Millares (Santa Fe de Mondújar) or Cerro de la Virgen (Orce, Granada) centralised the agricultural and livestock resources dominating a large territory where small dependent settlements were dispersed.
Los Millares society reached complex levels with regard to defensive systems (forts to guard the access to the village and their farm land) as well as with their urban planning that included public places and significant buildings (workshops, aqueducts, silos and cisterns).
At its peak, the central settlement of Los Millares had at least four lines of defensive walls, which could be entered via two gates, the large monumental entrance gate, in the central sector, had a large barbican or gatehouse with walls that were dotted with narrow arrow-slits.
The outer wall also served to separate the world of the living (the village) from that of the dead, the necropolis where they bury their elites.
The free areas not occupied by the graves were used for quarrying, or as pasture and farmland.
Retouched Blade (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
Los Millares society reached complex levels with a strong economic structure, with the emergence of specialists and craftsmen and long-distance trade.
The Andarax river was an important means of exchange of raw materials, products and goods. Its wharf concentrated most of the long-distance trade with other societies.
Dagger (2400 - 2200 BCE)Museo de Almería
The copper metallurgy and the trade of raw materials brought a technical development that supposed social inequalities among the people. This period is traditionally known as the Calcolithic Period or Copper Age.
The Circle of Life from outside (2006)Museo de Almería
This first floor also features a large imitation stone structure called the “Circle of Life,” which contains material connected with the external relations of Los Millares.
Arrowhead (3000 - 2001 BCE)Museo de Almería
Arrow heads which reflect war and commerce is represented by products traded over short and long distances.
- The stone for building mills, extracted in the area bordering the Cabo de Gata-Nijar Nature Reserve, is a prime example of local trade.
- While for medium-range trade, pottery was important.
- And, finally, there was the flint trade, conducted further afield; this material mainly came the limestone Subbética mountain range in the modern-day provinces of Granada and Málaga.
The Circle of Life from the inside (2006)Museo de Almería
In the inner circle are objects associated with day-to-day life in the settlement and the main activities involved: livestock breeding, pottery, the production of symbolic objects, medical practices, textiles for clothing, food storage, the milling of cereals, copper working and hunting.
These are all in fact productive and subsistence activities like biological reproduction (understood as the production of the new workforce) and which is represented by an almost life-size contemporary sculptural piece of a group at the time of childbirth.
The Circle of Life from the inside (2006)Museo de Almería
“Our hut will soon glow with the cries of a new-born life
Our circle will grow.
We hope for a female to produce more children and extend our clan.
We are happy, we celebrate and eat.
If all goes well.”
Cheese Making Mold (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
Livestock
Platter (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
Pottery Production
Amulet Pendant (2600 - 2300 BCE)Museo de Almería
Symbolic Objects
Skull with frontal trepanation (3000 - 2001 BCE)Museo de Almería
Medicinal Practices
Storage vessel (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
Milling and Food Storage
Palmela Arrowhead (2400 - 2200 BCE)Museo de Almería
Copper Working
Lebor Axe (3000 - 2001 BCE)Museo de Almería
Hunting
We continue our tour in the room dedicated to the symbolic and funerary world of the society of Los Millares.
The necropolis of the archaeological site of Los Millares is a unique example in the Iberian Peninsula, due to its size and the number of burials. Compared to other dolmen necropolis of tombs scattered around the area and with small necropolis of "tholoi" secondary towns like Terrera Ventura (Taverns), Los Millares is noted for its exceptionality.
Baetyl (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
In the society of Los Millares, the necropolis served three main purposes:
- Expressing social cohesion.
- Defining the inequality among lineages and settlements.
- Marking the cultivated and pasture land.
Cup from Los Blanquizares de Lébor (3000 - 2001 BCE)Museo de Almería
The burial groups show the existence of different lineages. The distance from the settlement is determined by the social status of the groups, as are the funerary goods found in the graves that contain prestigious artefacts.
Nevertheless, the existence in this necropolis of other types of burials (such as dolmens and some artificial caves), in which they probably buried the elites from other dependent areas, confirming that Los Millares was the great political centre of the region.
Idol (3400 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
In all the graves, funerary goods have been found composed of ceramic objects, bones, and stones, all with symbolic decorations.
In the room displays you’ll find grave goods from another necropolis, and also grave goods from Los Millares. You’ll be able to note the symbolic elements found in the burials.
The Circle of death (2006)Museo de Almería
The graves are comprised of a corridor and a round chamber with either a corbelled or false vault (tholoi) or flat roofs.
In this room the recreation of a tholos, evokes the moment of the funeral ritual, which we call the "Circle of Death.” Through an audiovisual which plays a burial ritual, it explains the collective use of tombs and the sequence ritual carried out at each new burial.
“Cry out, weep, tear your skin until you bleed, for our sister will live in the land of the circles of death.
Sing, dance, eat as our sister goes to meet our forebears.
Leave them food, leave them drink for them to celebrate.”
Axe (3200 - 2250 BCE)Museo de Almería
The society of Los Millares reaches its peak around 2700 – 2400 BCE, at the time of the 4th Dynasty of Pharaohs in Egypt (Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus), and royal cemetery of Ur in Mesopotamia.
Nevertheless, with a violent end, this social and economic organisation disappears around 2250 BCE, being replaced by the Argaric society.
Prehistory in the Museum of Almería: The first farming and stockbreeding societies and Los Millares Society
Organize:
Museo de Almería.
Consejería de Cultura de la Junta de Andalucía.
Texts: Encarna Maldonado Maldonado, Beba Pérez Bernárdez, Manuel Ramos Lizana, Guía breve del Museo de Almería y Proyecto museográfico Museo de Almería.
Photographs:
Miguel Ángel Marín Francisco y Fernando Alda.
Digital layout: Beba Pérez Bernárdez.
Museo de Almería.
