settlements

Around 400 BC, the fortified villages of northern Iberia emptied out, and they emptied fast. A new study of 109 archaeological sites has found that the hilltop settlements of the Early Iron Age were abandoned within less than a hundred years, and that inside any one region the social landscape turned over in roughly a generation. The villages that replaced them took two centuries to spread. The work was led by Samuel Nión-Álvarez of INCIPIT-CSIC in Santiago de Compostela and published open access in the Journal of Archaeological Science. It draws on 272 radiocarbon dates from five zones: the Atlantic seaboard, the western and eastern Cantabrian strip, and the western and eastern Meseta explains an Archaeology Magazine report. Northern Iberia