ABSTRACT
Within the traditional approach to Spanish prehistory, an essentially sociological concept such as the state was of no importance. From the publication of the Siret brothers’ Les Premiers Ages du Métal (Siret and Siret 1887), for almost a century interpretations were normativist in character: the critical issue was to determine the derivation of the stylistically distinctive features of the archaeological record. Over the course of their research, scholars arrived at a firm consensus as to how these features came to appear in the Iberian Peninsula: successive waves of immigrants or influences would have brought them from the eastern Mediterranean. The Iron Age obviously had arrived with the Phoenicians, and in earlier times similar agents would have brought metallurgy, megalithic monuments, and farming. A normative approach continues to be dominant in periods where diffusionism continues to have empirical support—that is, with respect to the arrival of the Neolithic and the cultural changes beginning in the Late Bronze Age. By the 1970s, however, the development of a radiocarbon-based chronology had made the concrete diffusionist scenarios developed for the Copper Age and the Early Bronze Age impossible to sustain. Some then-young researchers (I among them) began to consider how to explain the changes in the archaeological record for the fourth through second millennia b.c. in terms of a process of autochthonous development—that is to say, in terms of a process of social evolution. By now, when scholars try to explain chronologically coincident changes, such as the beginning of the Argaric with the start of the New Kingdom in Egypt or the end of the Argaric with the destruction of the Cretan palaces at the end of Late Minoan IB, the proposed causation involves climate changes or other environmental events (e.g., Lull et al. 2009: 225).
