La discusión sobre la función de los fosos en la Prehistoria Reciente del sur de la Península Ibérica. Modas y temores

Abstract

Se presentan aquí argumentos para la consideración de los fosos presentes en muchos poblados de la Prehistoria Reciente del sur de la Península Ibérica como partes de lasfortificaciones. Además se señala la relación del rechazo de este carácter defensivo con condicionantes históricos actuales y paradigmas dominantes.

This paper aims to offer a critical approach to interpretations of ditches located at southern Iberian Peninsula Late Prehistory sites as drainage and irrigation infrastructures or as expressions, sometimes symbolic ones, of population aggregation processes. On the contrary the lines of evidence presented against this hypothesis (course, depth, associations, delimited area, local and general chronological context), can connect them to other boundary systems which were sometimes contemporary. These features let us to define these ditch systems as defensive-dissuasive ones developed with full sedentism and consolidation of conflict among communities and raised with the first permanent social differences.