A singular funerary landscape from the Bronze Age at the South-West Iberia: the necropolis and the stelae of el Alto De La Cruz De Piedra (Jerez De Los Caballeros, Extremadura)

Abstract

This paper presents the finding of a new warrior stelae from the Southwestern Iberian Peninsula Late Bronze Age. This monument shows notable characteristics. This singularity comes not only from the rich collection of engraved motives, but also from the internal disposition of them and from the plain shape of the same stone, clearly carved for being watched from a unique direction and placed as upright stone. Although the main key of this finding is at the landscape. The stelae was discovered beside an old rural path, near a crossing called “Alto de la Cruz de Piedra”, because over there a Christian cross was built in granite along the 18^th Century A.D. From the stelae to the cross, several groups of Bronze Age cists are clearly visible along the way and, also, there are two possible megalithic graves north to the Christian cross. One of them it looks a tholos and the other is not possible to define by superficial reminds. Therefore, the stelae of the Late Bronze Age was an entrance mark of an older funerary landscape, from Late Neolithic to Middle Bronze Age. This relationship confirm the explanation of these warrior stelae of Prof. Almagro-Gorbea as the last testimonies of a prehistoric tradition which deeps origins in Megalithic monuments as the standing-stones menhirs.