Building the community - Argaric Culture

Life in Argaric communities, as in any society, is full of ritual practices that served to maintain relationships and forms of identity. Their best archaeological expression are funerary rituals. The Argaric funerary ritual took place inside the village, beneath the floor of the houses, and consisted in individual, doubles and sometimes triple burials in cists, pits, urns and small artificial caves. In the site of Cerro de la Encina, in the province of Granada, latter are the most common. The bodies are always placed in a fetal position and quite often women are buried on their right side while men appear on the left side.

These tombs include funerary offerings whose qualitative and quantitative range has been used to establish the different access to wealth and , consequently, they show the existence of a highly hierarchical society. Grave goods that can appear in the tombs range from ceramic vessels, metal tools, adornment elements as bracelets, earrings, beads and rings of different raw materials tomeat offerings, allowing us to approach to the social identity of these populations. The study of skeletal remains by anthropology and chemical analyses, in addition to sex and age, informs about the state of health, diet or muscular effort of the buried persons.