Iberians and Romans. Analysis of demography, society and culture in the foundation of Roman cities in the NE Hispania Citerior. Case studies

In the last decades the concept of romanization (glocalisation, hybridisation or creolisation in modern Anglo-Saxon terminology) and its real scope in the reality of Hispania is becoming object of multiple debates. Those debates discuss about the mechanisms that drove to the integration of the territories of Hispania in the Roman orbit were much more complex, slow and diverse of what the traditional historiography had thought. The hybridisation of the Iberian societies with newcomers generated a new social, economic and political structure that will end in the provincial HispanoRoman society, which requires a more detailed analysis than the one done so far. In this debate the archaeology can contribute with very valuable data for a better understanding of this process, and its degree of complexity. The aim of this project is to analyse the process of foundation of some of the Roman cities that were founded in the NE of the Hispania Citerior, which became late the Tarraconensis province, from the study of the social, cultural and demographic composition of these first urban centres. In the last years, the archaeologic and epigraphical evidence seem to suggest in an unambiguous form that the main part of the population settled in these urban centres of new creation was population mostly of native origin, with an external Italian contribution, or from other provinces of the Roman Empire. The proportion of the different groups appears difficult to determine, with the only exception of the colonies of new foundation such as Barcino. By means of the identification of the cultural links, social and the origin of these inhabitants, it will be possible to provide a more accurate view of the politics of occupation and control by Rome, and if the conquest really supposed a cultural hybridisation. However, if we wish to identify successfully the social and cultural composition of inhabitants of these cities, it is necessary to develop an interdisciplinary methodology and apply it in proper form. Thus, this project proposes to combine methods that obtain a big set of data generated from traditional archaeologic methods and other more interdisciplinary and innovative ones. Recognition of the social and cultural composition of ancient populations has been an aim developed in different international projects, but it has not applied in a systematic way in our country. Facing this problem in a comprehensive way requires combining cultural data from more traditional archaeology (architecture, ceramic productions, writing, divinities, consumption of foods) with biological data (like studies of lipids and DNA), which becomes here our innovative approach.