La Torre - La Janera: A new megalithic landscape in southern Spain

This week, archaeologists from the University of Huelva, Seville and others discovered an absolutely monumental (pun intended) megalithic site in southwestern Spain in the Lower Guadiana basin. The cluster of sites - collectively called La Torre-La Janera - is incredibly unique in that it contains not just dolmens, not just standing stone alignments, not just stone cists, but all three. In total, more than 500 megaliths, all on what was private land, have been discovered, most only recently revealed due to extremely arid conditions in that part of Spain. It is probably not an understatement to say that even before excavation - which is due to run until 2026 - La Torre could fundamentally reshape our understanding of the megalithic phenomenon in western Europe.

A different cromlech circle at Cáceres, of a similar age and recently exposed due to a historic drought.

The well-preserved megalithic complex, containing alignments, cromleches and dolmens, is not just important for its characteristics, but for its age. The archaeologists estimate that it was used over thousands of years, with cists and dolmens successively populating the site, starting from the second half of the 6th millennium BCE, or the start of the 5th, a range of roughly 5500 - 4600 BCE. This is well before even the oldest megaliths started to be built in Brittany or Ireland. Several other megalithic sites in western Spain have similar ages; the Almendres Cromlech in Portugal goes back as far as the early 6th millennium, but the La Torre site is special because of its diversity. The ancient Spaniards of La Torre continued an unbroken megalithic tradition for likely thousands of years, updating it with new monumental forms developed in the north.

Surveys can only tell us so much, but if the dating is accurate, it would definitely confirm that the megalithic tradition began in Spain, and more precisely in southwestern Spain. Its appearance in Brittany c.4800 BCE could then be linked to a propagation of a Neolithic cultural package by sea, which was imported to Ireland by c.4000 BCE (after at least one failed attempt) and Britain at the same time. That the site is well preserved may be thank to active preservation in antiquity, as according to the Roman author Pompeius Trogus (paraphrased by Strabo), the Turdetani tribe, who lived in south/southwest Spain, took pride of the heritage of their apparently six thousand years old kingdom. A related Celtic-speaking people, the Keltoi or Keltici, must have been aware of the site, as one of their settlements was situated a dozen kilometers away from the central complex. Until actual evidence of preservation is found though, this is just speculation.

Standing stone at La Torre, still preserved after 5,000 years and now living alongside wind turbines, modern-day monuments.

Not surprisingly, the alignments and dolmens  were constructed in relation to the path of the summer and winter solstices, with two cromleches positioned on a hill perfectly situated to view the solstice sunsets. More surprising was the discovery that some of the standing stones are engraved, which is not the case for megaliths in the British Isles. These engravings range from geometric motifs to circular cup and ring motifs. The latter might be examples of Late Neolithic 'Atlantic Rock Art', or perhaps a precursor to it. The former are found abundantly on Breton menhirs and passage graves, with geometric, schematic renditions of whales and other animals.

Can anything be concluded? If the ~5000 BCE date for them holds up (and there's no reason that it shouldn't), the builders of the monuments could have been the bearers of the La Almagra culture, which lasted in the region until it was replaced by the Cardium Pottery culture a few hundred years later. This is critical as the La Almagra culture is thought to have originated in pastoral north Africa, spreading to Europe as the savannah of the Sahara became desert. Their equivalent along the Nile Valley is the Badarian culture, whose pottery is nearly identical. An inference could then be made that megaliths originated with Neolithic pastoralists in the Sahara, and spread to Iberia, France, Britain and perhaps Egypt as the Sahara desiccated. 

This would tally with the suspected 'Afro-Asiatic' substrate in proto-Celtic word order, and would help to explain the pastoral focus of British cursuses - which are thought to have been used as hunting traps, maybe with an element of ceremony, for red deer and other animals. A distorted echo of the African origin of megaliths may even lie in Geoffrey of Monmouth's' Historia, where he claims that the stones of Stonehenge were originally transported to Ireland from the 'remotest confines of Africa'. 

Fantasy or not, the La Torre site (potentially) goes to show that without dark-skinned pastoralists arriving from the Sahara Desert, crossing the straits in hide-skin boats, Stonehenge, Newgrange and the megaliths of Brittany might not have been built. 

References:

Linares-Catela, JA ., Mora Molina, C. ., López López, A. ., Donaire Romero, T. ., Vera-Rodríguez, JC ., & Bueno Ramírez, P. . (2022). The megalithic site of La Torre-La Janera (Huelva): prehistoric monumentalities of Bajo Guadiana. Prehistory Works , 79 (1), 115–130. https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2022.12290