This book is about the war that the emperor Octavian Augustus waged to conquer the northern territories of the Iberian Peninsula in the 1st century BC. The campaigns against the Asturs and Cantabrians took place on a large scale over the course of a decade in the mountainous territories of the Cantabrian Sea.

In the late 20th century, some archaeological sites that had been part of this conflict began to be located. This has been one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent times. The surveys and excavations carried out in the last two decades have made it possible to begin to document these military campaigns through archaeology and to write a part of history that was unknown to us.

This book brings together the main contributions presented at the First Archaeological Meeting held in Gijón in October 2014 and its most outstanding value is that the works collected are the result of archaeological interventions.

The Project of Excellence Methodology for the archaeological study of battlefields and sieges in the context of the Second Punic War: Metauro, Iliturgi and Castulo (207/206 BC) (HAR2016-77847-P), aims to address, among other case studies, the archaeological analysis of the Iberian oppidum of Iliturgi and its leading role in the Second Punic War. Iliturgi and its territory become a laboratory to contrast different models of historical-archaeological interpretation proposed for other Iberian oppida and territories of the Upper Guadalquivir.

This research project aims to provide a novel reading of a specific territory, a reading that takes into account recent theoretical models that consider the complexity of the dialectic established between the conqueror and the conquered, the models of resistance, transformation, acceptance, imitation, emulation, hybridisation… that will lay the foundations for subsequent Romanisation, understood as a heterogeneous and local form of adaptive response to the new cultural, social, political and economic circumstances.