Community, Identity, and Conflict

Iron Age Warfare in the Iberian Northwest

Bibliographic Data

ID2220470
AuthorsInés Sastre (0000-0001-5487-705X, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume49
Issue6
Pages1021-1051
Publication date2008-12-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCurrent Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0011-3204 • E-ISSN: 1537-5382
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1086/529423
PMID19391444
OpenAlexW1509932137
LanguageEN
Citations received21
References cited68

This paper proposes a new view of conflict in European Iron Age societies: considering isolationism as an alternative to warfare. Study of the castros (fortified settlements) of the Iberian Northwest suggests the organization of production as a main explanatory element in the emergence of identities based on exclusion and the imposition of communal structures of power. The relationship between these communities must have been one of conflict, and the unequal productive success of domestic units and the requirement of external marriage interchanges created realms of interaction in which internal conflict surely arose. These tendencies were kept in check by controlling settlement growth. Although a conflict-prone situation is documented in the archaeological record, there is no evidence that warfare as an endemic reality created groups of warriors. Warfare-related activity in these Iron Age societies was neither heroic nor hierarchical. Warfare did not determine the form of society but rather was related to the productive and reproductive organization of the societies that engaged in it

Archaeology · Collective identity · Economics · Element (criminal law · Geography · Human settlement · Identity (music · Isolationism · Political economy · Political science · Power (physics · Settlement (finance · Sociology · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Law · Medieval Architecture and Archaeology

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