The Argaric settlement at Las Herrerías (Cuevas de Almanzora, Almería), based on unpublished L. Siret's notes

Abstract

During the first decades of this century, L. Siret documented a series of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age remains at Las Herrerías that were discovered (and subsequently destroyed) by mining operations of the time. Today his notes constitute the only evidence for what once must have been a fairly rich archaeological locality. Based on Siret's notes and the few finds he managed to rescue, we can reconstruct it as an open and rather dispersed, though certainly large, settlement that lacks the tightly knit, nuclear structure with almost urban features displayed by most other known Argaric habitation sites. The haphazard and unsystematic way in which Siret documented the funerary remains, and in which he and later authors published them, has led to some confusion about the actual composition of the assemblages and about their relative and absolute chronology. Also contributing to this confusion was a mixing of materials from two of the graves that occurred in the 1950s, after the finds had been deposited in the National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid. The present contribution seeks to give a systematic account of the site based on Siret's notes and the surviving finds in order to sort out these problems and to call special attention to the coastal settlements of the El Argar Culture, which have been hitherto largely ignored by archaeologists and which are currently endangered by a variety of natural factor s and human actions.