The ‘Petrifying Wealth’ project analyses the structural changes in Europe that led to the birth of a new architectural landscape between the 11th and 13th centuries, characterised by the widespread and rapid spread of masonry. Between 1050 and 1300 the European landscape turned to stone. It was a structural transformation that led to the birth of a new, long-lasting landscape and helped to create individual, collective and regional identities: a landscape that embodies the way we see the space and territory of Europe.
This project seeks to rewrite the social history of the central Middle Ages, emphasising the need to reassess from an untested perspective an element that has always been present in our view of the period – the sudden ubiquity of masonry construction – but has hardly been given the opportunity to provide in-depth explanations for complex social dynamics. A project that seeks to offer new explanations to previously unasked questions about wealth, construction and collective identity.

Updated overview of the results of a research project on the prehistoric exploitation of salt in the Villafáfila lagoons (Zamora). The main focus is on the operational chain of the factory at the Molino Sanchón II site, where salt was obtained by the evaporation of the salt flats. But it also discusses the role of the luxurious Campaniform Vessels in this production centre, concluding that they were a symbolic marker used by the elites of the time to control such a lucrative activity.

The ancient Neolithic flint mines of Casa Montero were discovered in the summer of 2003, when archaeological work was being carried out prior to the construction of the Madrid M-50 ring road. A project financed by the 1% Cultural Fund has maintained the research for more than 6 years. The interdisciplinary team made up of more than 59 researchers from 19 institutions and 13 companies has dedicated its efforts to protect, study and publicise the traces left by the communities that came to this enclave to extract flint from the interior of the earth more than 7000 years ago. In this conference we will tell you when, how, who and why they did it.

During the month of July 2019, the last excavation campaign was carried out in the Els Trocs cave, in the Aragonese Alta Ribagorza. It is the right time to make an overall assessment of the ten years of archaeological interventions in a site that has yielded spectacular scientific results that are being studied by a large multidisciplinary and international team.
Both its location next to the axial Pyrenees and at a junction of communications and traditional paths possibly used since the Neolithic period, and the enormous archaeological evidence recovered in its archaeological levels make Els Trocs a reference site for studying the early Neolithisation of mountain areas. Through the different archaeological, genetic, faunal, isotopic and palaeoenvironmental studies, etc., we will try to get to know a human group that in very early dates (last third of the 6th millennium BC) carried out a seasonal exploitation of the environment and used the cave to carry out certain ritual and subsistence activities. The knowledge and/or conquest of the territory must not have been an easy task, since among the human remains recovered inside the cave we find evidence of unusual violence. Nevertheless, in the last campaign, and in a very special place in the cave, we found the only structured tomb in the whole complex; a child’s tomb which we will present as a preview in this talk.

The Geological and Mining Institute of Spain presents Archaeology, Hydrogeology and Environment in the Bronze Age of La Mancha: the Culture of the Motillas, a work of high scientific dissemination that exposes part of the results of the research co-funded in 2014 by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha and the Geological and Mining Institute of Spain.

The book explains what life was like during Prehistoric times in La Mancha 2000 years BC. The contents include an exhaustive bibliography and a complete review of the Motilla or Bronze Age Culture of La Mancha. It also provides new data that were unknown until now. In summary, our ancestors suffered a very prolonged drought that led them to build a network of wells (motillas) in this region to supply themselves with water from the aquifer, given that the surface water disappeared from the rivers and springs. At the same time as the wells, burial mounds were built, monuments oriented to the stars in which complex rituals were performed (deposit of offerings, burial of the deceased and transfer of their bones once they had been skeletonised, etc.). Several drawings show the reader the reconstruction of everyday scenes from those times; in fact, they are innovative interpretative proposals that facilitate the understanding of the data offered.