NOT FAR FROM THE Andalusian coast in southwestern Iberia, an unusual group of women was laid to rest around 4,800 years ago. Their communal tomb, known as the Montelirio tholos, was built into the east side of a natural hill. A 125-foot-long subterranean corridor with sandstone, granite, and slate roofing extended inward from the entrance. Along this passageway were vertical slate slabs coated with the blood-red pigment cinnabar, or mercury sulfide. At the corridor’s end was a circular chamber 15 feet in diameter, with a vaulted earthen ceiling rising at least 13 feet high, most likely supported during construction by wooden posts. Its sides, too, were lined with cinnabar-coated slate slabs, which served as a canvas for black, white, and red geometric motifs. One of these, a circle with short lines extending outward, known to scholars as an oculus, is thought to have been an important sacred symbol at the time, representing concepts including the sun, vision, and esoteric knowledge. “The impression for anyone who went into this tomb, with its vivid red environment, must have been really powerful,” says archaeologist Leonardo García Sanjuán of the University of Seville, who leads a team that has studied the Montelirio tholos and other archaeological features of the surrounding landscape since 2010. “It must have been an intense sensory experience.”
The 20 people whose remains were discovered in the chamber by archaeologist Álvaro Fernández Flores in 2010 and 2011 died between the ages of 18 and 45 and were buried over a period of a few decades at most. Researchers have concluded, based on their skeletons, that at least 15 were female. The sex of the other five remains undetermined. At least six of the women were buried wearing elaborate outfits, containing, in all, around a quarter of a million beads carved from marine shells. The production of this finery would have required an extraordinary amount of labor. A clay stela thought to represent a mother goddess, bearing red and white motifs, was placed at thegenerally not buried in a fetal position, which was the norm at the time. One, laid at the stela’s base, had her arms spread out, reaching upward in a reverential pose. “These women seem to have been religious specialists in the cult of this female deity, what in Classical societies we would call priestesses,” says García Sanjuán. “The presence of this stela and all the symbols raises the possibility that, as well as a burial, this was some kind of temple or religious building.”
