When they began excavating five years ago at Casas del Turuñuelo, a Tartessian site in Guareña (Badajoz), scientists thought they were facing a hecatomb. According to the RAE dictionary, hecatomb refers to a large number of deaths or a catastrophe. Thirdly, the original meaning of the word appears, which comes from ancient Greek: sacrifice of 100 cattle or other sacrifices that the ancients offered to their gods. Not 100 oxen were found in Turuñuelo, but remains of about fifty animals, especially horses. The detailed examination of all the animals now makes clear the importance of this place for its builders, the Tartessians. But the reasons why Tartessos abandoned this type of sanctuary, as well as the rest of its buildings, and disappeared into history remain a mystery.
Casas del Turuñuelo was discovered in 2014. It was buried under six meters of mud and soil that came from the nearby Guadiana River. When they excavated it the following year, they found a two-story building. “Something like this would only appear in the western Mediterranean in Roman times, before Pompeii,” says Sebastián Celestino, researcher at the Institute of Archeology of Mérida (IAM-CSIC) and co-director of the Turuñuelo excavation. Using various dating techniques, they indicated that it was in use as early as the 5th century BCE, around 2,500 years ago. These were the last times of the Tartessian civilization, which arose on the coast of what is now Cadiz by Phoenicians who came from the eastern Mediterranean and extended from the Guadalquivir Valley to the Guadiana. For the ancient Greeks, it was the greatest civilization in the West. During the excavation, they discovered a room with an altar in the shape of an ox skin, containing decorative elements of Carthaginian or even Greek origin, where there were also animal remains. But as they went down, they first found two horses at the bottom of a staircase, then a kind of terrace with about twenty animals, and later, under this layer of bones, another with dozens more creatures. It was believed at the time that they were part of a Greek-style hecatomb and a subsequent banquet. The full examination of all the remains now tells a different story.
The results of the archaeozoological study of the bone remains, published in the journal PLoS ONE, identified 52 animals. The majority are horses (41 in total) and adult mules, but there are also cattle (bulls and cows), pigs and a dog. However, stratigraphic analysis shows that this mass sacrifice did not occur during a single hecatomb, but was part of a series of rituals performed in the building’s final years until its abandonment and then deliberately sealed.
The two images show some of the 51 animals that were sacrificed and distributed in three different phases. Tarteso building
“At first it seemed to us that the sacrifice had been made in a single moment,” says zooarchaeologist at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the analysis of the animals, Silvia Albizuri. “You get there, you see the statue and you think that they were all sacrificed that way,” adds his research colleague Mª Pilar Iborra, researcher at the Valencian Institute of Conservation, Restoration and Research. “The taphonomic study [la ciencia de la formación de un fósil desde algo vivo] “Through our work we have obtained information about the history of this deposit, from its burial to its excavation,” explains Iborra. “The bones collect all this information, everything that happened to them, whether they were sacrificed, whether they were eaten, whether they were exposed to the sun. All this information has allowed us to define that there are three main deposit moments.” Casas del Turuñuelo was a kind of refuge where the Tartessians made sacrifices for years, “maybe a decade,” concludes Iborra.
The analysis also revealed that the equids were adult males, almost all between five and eight years old. Of the six cattle, four were bulls, while the pig remains belonged to adult sows. For scientists, age is crucial to rule out that they were placed there after a natural death or due to illness. The sacrifice theory gains strength when one considers that both horses and sows were at the peak of their useful life, whether as beasts of burden, for the bigas ruled by charioteers, or for breeding. As the Albizuri zooarchaeologist says, “this represents an enormous effort for a community.”
Confirmation of a ritual sacrifice is evident in the bones from the first two stages of burial. It is not only that each layer was separated by a kind of mantle of about fifteen centimeters of burnt grain, which would indicate offerings for the fertility of the land, but also that the bones show no traces of dismemberment, disembowelment or consumption of the people. In addition, the specimens of the first, the oldest, show that they were exposed to the environment, the sun and the action of the wind. “When they make a sacrifice, they do not bury it. They want people to see it. It is an exhibition of what you have done and what has cost a lot because you are sacrificing animals that are very valuable,” says Iborra.
“When they make a sacrifice, they do not bury it. They want people to see it. It’s an exhibition of what you did and what cost a lot.”
Mª Pilar Iborra, researcher at the Valencian Institute of Conservation, Restoration and Research
But in the third phase something changed. “What we observed in the last phase of storage is that, in addition to the sacrifice of animals, their meat was also consumed, but not that of horses, but only cows and a calf, on which we even discovered human bite marks.” . Then a banquet would be held, an act of commensality in this final phase,” says Iborra. His colleague Albizuri adds: “When we talk about a banquet, we are talking about a meal that we do not know where it was celebrated, but we know that the remains of that meal were left on the terrace.” Because another What they did when they finished an act of this kind was to put the remains in an abandoned silo.” Iborra adds: “It was about preserving the memory of this act. In fact, in the calf in phase 3, all bones are unconnected, with slaughter marks, with human bite marks, but all deposited together, with no anatomical connection, but grouped. “In the Iron Age these bothros were very common.” In the Odyssey, Homer described the bothros as dug holes into which libations for the dead were poured and upon which victims were sacrificed. After this banquet or shortly thereafter, the Casa del Turuñuelo was buried and the place was abandoned.
Neither Iborra nor Albizuri know the reason for the abandonment. Neither did the co-director of the excavations. “They sealed it with clay and left it,” Celestino says. But like Turuñuelo, “we have 13 other Tartessian sites, all intentionally buried and abandoned at the same time in the 5th century.” [antes de esta era]. Something happened that affected everyone.” Together with geologists and paleoclimatologists, they are investigating whether the cause could have been a prolonged drought or, on the contrary, a result of rainfall. With the help of the Palarq Foundation and state and regional administrations, researchers want to uncover more sites in Tartessos and continue excavations in Casas del Turuñuelo because they are convinced that there is something more behind the sacrificed animals.
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