Archaeological and Historical Studies

Archaeology of the Iberian Peninsula reconstructs the layered societies that inhabited modern-day Spain and Portugal from roughly the first millennium BCE through the early centuries of Roman rule, drawing on excavated settlements, coinage, inscriptions, and ritual deposits to understand how peoples such as the Celtiberians, Lusitanians, and Turdetanians organized their lives and beliefs. The region sits at a crossroads where Phoenician traders from the eastern Mediterranean, Greek colonists, and eventually Roman armies each left material traces, making it an unusually rich site for studying how cultures absorb, resist, and transform outside influences. Researchers are actively debating the pace and depth of Romanization — whether it reshaped local identities quickly or allowed indigenous practices to persist for generations beneath a Roman surface — as well as how to interpret the diverse religious iconography and sanctuary sites that suggest belief systems far more complex than early scholarship acknowledged. Numismatic evidence, particularly the bilingual and script-mixing coinages of the late Iron Age, continues to open new questions about political authority, regional identity, and literacy in communities that left few written records of their own.

Works

295,544

Total citations

246,068

Keywords

Iberian PeninsulaarchaeologyIron AgeRomanizationCeltic culturePhoenician influence