Identitarian and power construction strategies during the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition

Abstract

We put forward a long term explanatory model to account for a series of gold finds all along the Iberian Peninsula Atlantic seaboard during the Bronze Age and the Bronze Age-Iron Age transition, a phenomenon of a unique dimension in the european panorama of the prehistoric gold production. The case study is three different forms of hoarding: hoards containing spirals or chains of spirals; hoards containing torcs of the Sagrajas/Berzocana type; and hoards with Villena/Estremoz type bracelets.
We analyse some aspects of the production, distribution and consumption of the stated gold material, mainly those referring to manufacturing processes and knowledge transmission phenomena, which has allowed us to characterise different technological domain systems and to define how they interact at the time when a third technological domain appears in scene. Finally we propose a diachronic frame of relations between the three domain systems.