Agricultural production and social change in the Bronze Age of southeast Spain: The Gatas Project

This paper presents new data on agricultural production, the palaeoenvironment and social change during the Bronze Age of southeast Spain. The authors argue against the inference of irrigation as the basis for agriculture and relate the emergence of cereal monoculture to the extraction of surplus and the exploitation of human labour. In the rest of this paper, we present data from Gatas principally on changing production during the Copper and Bronze Ages, developing the arguments proposed in an earlier paper (Ruiz et al. 1992). Most of this data comes from phase 2 of the project (Castro et al. in press a), although none of the data so far available to us from phase 3 in any way contradict our broad interpretation. Wherever possible, the Gatas data will be placed in a more regional context. The data are presented by radiocarbon-dated occupation phases at Gatas (see Castro et al. in press a).