Location of Some Iberian Tribes in the Third and Second Centuries bce
Celtiberians
Major fortified Celtiberian settlement
ATLANTIC OCEAN
150 miles
Celtiberians
Major fortified Celtiberian settlement
- Carthaginian city o Creek city
- Contemporary political boundaries
150 miles rather than the return of dense forests that occurred elsewhere in Europe. Despite the challenges, people here continued making masterful figurative art, paintings on open-air limestone outcrops that are found in the Spanish Levant of archers hunting red deer and other animals. Other pictures show figures climbing trees for honey, in one example carrying a collecting pot and being greeted by a swarm of bees. Other scenes show dancers, and groups of archers confronting one another; the latter have been variously interpreted as battle scenes or, because of what appear to be slain deer shown between the two groups, a cooperative hunt that has rounded up a deer herd.
Sedentary populations settled from about 6500 b.c.e. along Atlantic estuaries of present-day Portugal, where shell middens have been found. Although the evidence for the arrival of agricultural practices in Iberia is sparse and hard to decipher, the existence of such sedentary groups provides good evidence that the relative sedentary existence fostered by agriculture would not have been new to indigenous people. Farming may have come to Iberia both as farming groups migrated there and as native peoples adopted farming practices themselves. Caves in eastern Spain with the earliest evidence of farming, including sheep and goat remains and impressed pottery, date from 6000 b.c.e. Cereals were being grown from the sixth millennium b.c.e. An unanswered question is whether people from North Africa migrated to Iberia, introducing farming practices with them; as yet the evidence is too sparse to determine this. The aridity of southeastern Spain adjacent to the Strait of Gibraltar could have discouraged migration.
In the late Neolithic along the Atlantic coast of Spain and later also the Mediterranean coast large stone constructions began to be built. The megalithic works in Iberia are similar to large timber and stone tombs covered by long or circular mounds built in a zone that
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