When five years ago they began to excavate the Casa del Turuñuelo, in Guareña (Badajoz), scientists believed they were facing a hecatomb. According to the RAE dictionary, hecatomb refers to a great death toll or catastrophe. Thirdly, the original meaning of the word appears, which comes from ancient Greek: Sacrifice of 100 cattle or other victims, which the ancients made to their gods. In Turuñuelo, they have not found 100 oxen, but they have found remains of around fifty animals, especially horses. Now, the in-depth study of all the animals illuminates the relevance of this place for its builders, the Tartessians. But the reasons why Tartessos abandoned this kind of sanctuary, like the rest of his buildings, to disappear into history, remain a mystery.
The Casa del Turuñuelo was discovered in 2014. It was buried under six meters of silt and earth brought from the nearby Guadiana River. When they unearthed it the following year, they found a two-story building. “Something like this would not appear in the western Mediterranean until Roman times, until Pompeii,” says Sebastián Celestino, researcher at the Institute of Archeology of Mérida (IAM-CSIC) and co-director of the Turuñuelo excavation. Using different dating techniques, they indicated that it was in use in the 5th century before the current era, about 2,500 years ago. These were the last times of the Tartessian civilization, born on the coast of what is now Cádiz at the hands of Phoenicians who came from the eastern Mediterranean and expanded from the Guadalquivir valley to the Guadiana. For the ancient Greeks, it was the greatest civilization in the West. When excavating they discovered a room with an altar in the shape of an ox skin in which there were decorative elements of Carthaginian or even Greek origin in which there were also animal remains. But as they went down they first found two horses at the foot of a staircase, then a kind of patio with about twenty animals and later, under that layer of bones, another with dozens more beings. It was then believed that they were part of a Greek-style hecatomb and subsequent banquet. Now, the complete review of all the remains tells another story.
The results of the archaeozoological study of the bone remains, published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, they have identified 52 animals. The majority are horses (41 of the total) and adult mules, but there are also bovids (bulls and cows), pigs and a dog. But stratigraphic analysis shows that this mass sacrifice was not during a single hecatomb, but was part of a series of rituals carried out in the last years of the building until its abandonment, when it was intentionally sealed.
“At first the sacrifice seemed to us to have been made in a single moment,” says the zooarchaeologist at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the analysis of the animals, Silvia Albizuri. “You get there, you see that still photo, and you think that they have all been sacrificed like that,” adds her 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] What we have done has given us information about the history of that deposit, from when it was buried until it was unearthed,” explains Iborra. “The bones collect all that information, everything that has happened to them, if they have been sacrificed, if they have been consumed, if they have been exposed to the sun. All this information is what has allowed us to define that there are three major moments of deposit.” The House of Turuñuelo was a kind of sanctuary in which the Tartessians made sacrifices for years, “perhaps a decade,” Iborra concludes.
The analysis has also shown that the equids were adult males, almost all aged between five and eight years. Of the six bovids, four were bulls, while the pig remains belonged to adult sows. Age is key for scientists to rule out that they had been deposited there after a natural death or due to an illness. The thesis of sacrifice gains more strength when one takes into account that both horses and sows were at the peak of their useful life, whether as pack animals, for the bigas governed by charioteers or for breeding. As the Albizuri zooarchaeologist says, “this implies an enormous effort for a community.”
Confirmation of ritual sacrifice is evident in the bones from the first two phases of the burial. It is not only that the two layers were separated by a kind of blanket of about fifteen centimeters of burnt cereals, which would relate it to offerings for the fertility of the land, but that the bones have no marks of having been dismembered, gutted or consumed by the humans. Furthermore, the specimens of the first, the oldest, show that they were exposed to the environment, to the sun, to the action of the wind. “When they make a sacrifice they don’t bury it, what they want is for people to see it. It is an exhibition of what you have done and what has cost a lot to do, because you sacrifice animals that are very precious,” says Iborra.
“When they make a sacrifice they don’t bury it, what they want is for people to see it. It is an exhibition of what you have done and what has cost a lot to do”
Mª Pilar Iborra, researcher at the Valencian Institute of Conservation, Restoration and Research
But in the third phase, something has changed. “What we have been able to observe 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, only cows and a calf, in which we even detected human bite marks. Then a banquet would be held, an act of commensality in that last phase,” says Iborra. His colleague Albizuri adds: “when we talk about a banquet, we talk about a meal that we do not know where it was held, but we do know that the remains of that meal were left in the patio. Because another thing they used to do when they finished an act of these characteristics, they placed the remains in an abandoned silo.” To which Iborra adds: “It was to preserve the memory of that act. In fact, in that phase 3, the calf has all the bones unconnected, with butchery marks, with human bite marks, but all deposited together, without anatomical connection, but grouped. In the Iron Age these were very common bothros”. In the OdysseyHomer described the bothros like dug holes into which the libation for the dead was poured and the victims were sacrificed on top of it. After that banquet or shortly after, the Casa del Turuñuelo was buried and the place 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 abandoned it,” says Celestino. But like the Casa del Turuñuelo, “we have 13 other Tartessian locations, all intentionally buried and all abandoned at the same time, in the 5th century.” [antes de esta era]. Something happened that affected everyone.” They are working with geologists and paleoclimatologists to investigate whether the cause could have been a persistent drought or, on the contrary, a succession of rains. With the help of the Palarq Foundation and the state and regional administrations, researchers want to unearth more places in Tartessos and continue excavating at the Casa del Turuñuelo, because they are convinced that there is something more beneath the sacrificed animals.
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