Una aproximación cuantitativa al trabajo destinado a la arquitectura monumental en la prehistoria reciente de la Meseta Norte Española

Abstract

Most of the prehistoric cultures share the characteristic of having produced monumental architecture, which is a good indicator of the size of the polity responsible of its construction. The measurement of monuments' size and volumes could be used to estimate the quantity of work invested by using coefficients deduced from experimental archaeology or ethnographic observations. This is thought to be an appropriate way to calculate the political power behind labor mobilization. In this paper this strategy is applied to monuments of the Late Prehistoric Spanish Northern Meseta such as megalithic buildings, walled settlements and causewayed enclosures. The results offer two patterns. The work invested on monuments grew exponentially from the Early Neolithic to the Copper Age, and there were more work invested per monument on the central and southwestern Northern Meseta than on the northeastern part. The variable of work invested contextualized with other issues such as demography, economic specialization or social inequalities could be a good indicator to count for the archaeology of cultural transformation processes.