Una nueva sepultura del grupo Cogotas I en "El Juncal" (Villaralbo, Zamora)

Resumen

Burial practices of the Bronze Age societies in the Iberian Meseta (Cogotas I culture) are still poorly known due to scarcity of archaeological evidence. A newly-found tomb of this period discovered at Villaralbo (prov. Zamora, Spain) is presented here. The research procedure carried out to study this archaeological site has turned out to be very successful. Therefore other tombs of the same period should be looked at using the same research protocol. In this site, one of many ‘pit sites’ of the regional Calcolithic and Bronze Age, abundant underground structures containing pottery sherds and faunal bones have been found, one of which contained a primary burial of individual inhumation. Those pits seem to belong, in view of the content of their filling materials, at least to three different moments, reason why the filling of the funeral pit has been carefully considered, being able to be dated in the Protocogotas phase (Middle Bronze Age), chronology that has been corroborated with a radiocarbon dating (3335 ± 35 BP). As part of the working protocol that we have been applying to all the human remains of this archaeological culture included in our Research Project, this skeleton has been studied from a bioarchaeological approach, seeking to establish not only the circumstances of the interment, that it seems to have been protected by a covering element, but also the anthropological traits of the individual, a subadult, of about a 17-19 years, whose remains do not reflect neither injuries, nor pathological deficiencies or processes; in addition, samples for isotopic and DNA analyses have been collected. The lack of grave goods in this tomb agrees with the predominant pattern in the Protocogotas phase tombs, whereas the lateral decubitus of a male on the left side moves away of a supposed characteristic tendency that seemed to be emerging, but that it will have to wait for a statistical treatment in depth.