The Iberians cut off the heads of their enemies, but also of those they venerated.

BarcelonaIberian culture remains a great mystery, as it disappeared without leaving any written trace that we can interpret. Their language died out and no bilingual text has been found that could document what they believed in, the role of women or whether there was a great Iberian city in Barcelona. However, archaeology continues to provide new clues. and the latest research, in the field of isotope analysis, helps to understand why the Iberians cut off heads and nailed them to walls.

A study led by the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) has analyzed the mobility patterns of human communities in the Iron Age of the last millennium before our era and, specifically, has studied seven nailed skulls of men from the ancient city of Ullastret (in the municipality of the t).

"We had limited knowledge, because normally Roman written sources were used, which referred to severed heads from Gaul. And it had been wrongly assumed that they were war trophies. Firstly, they are documents that were written centuries later, and secondly, the details ane, archaeologist at the UAB and first author of the study, which has been published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The first conclusion of the study is that in Ullastret and in Puig Castellar the rituals were quite different. "In Puig Castellar the skulls were nailed to the wall, while in Ullastret they were on the walls or on the doors of the houses. When they nailed the skulls they did it to send a message to the living, they had an intention, and if you do it in one place or another, you are addressing a different audience. In the case of Puig Castellar."

Whose skulls were they?

Isotope analyses range from diet, climate, animal, human and merchandise mobility and dating to practices such as breastfeeding or how food was cooked. In this case, they have been used to identify which individuals the nailed skulls came from. At Puig Castellar, the isotopic values of three of the four individuals differ significantly from the local strontium reference, suggesting that they were probably not local. In contrast, at Ullastret we have found a mixture of local and non-local origins. "More research to be sure," says De la Fuente Seoane.

The study therefore indicates that while in Puig Castellar the chiefs surely served to warn the enemy of what could happen to them if they attacked, in Ullastret it was a ritual to venerate the ancestors. To carry out the study, the research team has combined bioarchaeology and the analysis of stable isotopes of strontium and oxygen in the dental enamel of the seven skulls, together with archaeozoological data and a detailed sampling of sediment and vegetation collected in the vicinity of the sites.

The study also emphasises that Iberian culture was not homogeneous. Previous research on Iberian land management has suggested differences in how these societies exploited the resources around them. "There were many territorial differences and a process took place in which these differences were even more accentuated. There was an accumulation of wealth by elites and territorial entities with very important political-religious differences were generated," the archaeologist points out.

"Severed heads are a unique ritual practice within the Iberian world and offer an exceptional opportunity to analyse these communities. If we have now discovered this, we will be able to learn much more if we study many other skulls," says the archaeologist. One of the problems with Iberian culture is that there is very little anthropological record of funerary nature, as they practised cremation. In this study, the skulls of seven men have been analysed, but many mysteries remain to be solved. For example, why did they nail up the skull of a woman between 30 and 40 years old, the first documented in the world, which was discovered in 1911, precisely in the Puig Castellar site.