Territorialisation and human mobility during the Iron Age in NE Iberia: An approach through Isotope Analyses of the Severed Heads from Puig Castellar (Barcelona, Spain) and Ullastret (Girona, Spain)

During the late 1st millennium BCE, the societies from northeastern Iberia underwent rapid transformations due to their interaction with Mediterranean networks. The archaeological record reflects a widespread process of territorialisation and the emergence of social inequalities. However, the generalisation of cremation as the funerary practice makes more difficult to reconstruct the biological characteristics and social structure of these communities.

The severed heads represent a unique symbolic practice within the Iberian world and offer an exceptional opportunity to analyse these communities. It has been proposed that they might have been protective relics from ancestors or war trophies of foreign enemies. But these hypotheses have not been tested yet, nor has the relationship of these groups with their territory.

This paper provides new data to understand how interactions between human communities linked to the NE Iberian territory were articulated. This has been possible thanks to the analysis of seven severed skulls from two major sites: Ullastret and Puig Castellar. This was performed using a multiproxy approach combining bioarchaeology with δ¹⁸O and⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr stable isotope analyses. The integration of anthropological, isotopic, and archaeozoological data, along with local baselines of bioavailable strontium values has provided valuable information about the degree of connectivity between territories, and the impact of sociopolitical context system on human and animal mobility in local Iron Age societies.