After crossing a gravel road surrounded by sun-scorched plains, I finally arrived at the archaeological site of Cancho Roano. Standing here in the Guadiana Valley in the Extremadura region of southwestern Spain, I imagined how different this dusty, dry plain would have looked 2,500 years ago when it was a center of trade and worship for the Tartessos, a mysterious Iberian society that flourished between the 9th and 5th century BC – and then suddenly disappeared.
Today, however, the culmination of ongoing research and new technologies are revealing more about this lost civilization and the role it played in Iberia’s history.
Going back millennia, Tartessos has been mentioned in Greek and Roman texts, but due to conflicting descriptions – and a long absence of conclusive archaeological evidence – it has not been easy for modern historians and archaeologists to determine exactly what Tartessos was – a city, a kingdom, River?
Herodotus, the Greek historian of the 5th century BC, wrote of a port city beyond the Pillars of Hercules (present-day Strait of Gibraltar), leading some researchers to think that Tartessos was a body of water and others to think that it was a port (probably located around present-day Huelva on the southern coast of Spain). There were even theories inspired by the writings of Aristotle that Tartessos was the mythical Atlantis, although this was widely dismissed in the scientific community.
Tartessos is now generally considered to be a civilization formed by a mixture of the indigenous population and the Greek and Phoenician colonizers of the Iberian Peninsula. It was also wealthy, thanks to abundant metal resources and a prosperous trading economy. Early discoveries led historians to believe the civilization was centered around the Guadalquivir Valley in Andalusia, but more recent finds in the Guadiana Valley – further west, near Spain’s border with Portugal – have led archaeologists to rethink just how extensive it was Tartessos. In total, more than 20 Tartessos sites have been identified in Spain, and three have been excavated in the Guadiana Valley: Cancho Roano, Casas de Turunuelo and La Mata.
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