Cabezo Juré. Environmental impact in prehistory.

Feats in Cabezo Juré

El Cabezo Juré is one of those magical places that every child should explore with their gang of friends. An excursion turned into endless adventures where the dark caves full of bats were illuminated by torches casting terrifying shadows in all directions. Where the cold and the humidity were digging through your bones. Where you begin to appreciate the value of the hand of a friend who helps you overcome panic and overcome obstacles so that all together we could reach the end of that network of galleries in that abandoned mine... Leaving that “underworld” you were a hero and you could never forget the “great feat”.

When we left the caves behind, we all went to the “pinuricha”, which is what we call the tops of our heads in El Alosno. From there, the landscape is breathtaking. The Great Mediterranean Mountain became a green carpet at our feet. That giant and endless forest full of animals and plants that we were competing to know...” Our First School”.

And when you return home, the smell of a fireplace, the glass of cigar burning under the petticoats of the stretcher's table, the kiss of your grandmother and mother, that sandwich of village bread and the glass of milk from the neighbor's cows. The security of home, but you only dreamed of returning to that magical place... to Cabezo Juré.

Return to the Juré

It's curious how the scenarios where so many episodes of your life have been played, all of a sudden, far from being an obsolete and re-read page of the script, once again become an inexhaustible source of knowledge and inspiration.

That happened to me with Cabezo Juré already in my youth when I found out that a certain Francisco Nocete Calvo, director of Odiel Project, I had discovered a Chalcolithic village on the top of that Cabezo that watched me grow up. At that time, my university career (Forest Technical Engineering) had just begun. My two passions came together unexpectedly: Archaeology and the forest.

I didn't stop until I managed to work on the excavation and day after day, at snack time, I was looking for an excuse to eat with the archaeologists and satisfy my curiosity about so many unknowns about that town... I was accidentally returning to my childhood and that magical place was once again becoming the protagonist of my dreams.

In pleasant conversations and by honing my ears very well, I was able to understand how incredibly important this place was since time immemorial.

Turns out that 5000 years ago things happened in that place that didn't happen anywhere else. There lived a community so specialized in metallurgical production, that they almost only did that... produce metal manufactures such as axes, different knives, punches, needles and copper ingots to trade with other towns where that raw material was a real technological revolution. In addition, they produced some of the most abundant arrowheads and flint spears in the Iberian Peninsula.

The town of Juré was heavily hierarchical. There was a wall that separated an elite that controlled copper furnaces, the production, manufacture and distribution of metal tools and tools to the rest of the town. They also controlled a huge cistern that, according to the technicians, was not only useful for the casting process. Surely, and due to its large capacity, it also served to redistribute water to the rest of the town in case of need.

Environmental impact

The more I knew about that town, the more fascinated I was with everything that surrounded the life of that community. Not only when it comes to mining, social hierarchy, production of all kinds of household and commercial tools, but I also began to be interested in environmental impact which caused this enormous mining activity. As the life of the village progressed, the felling of trees intensified and deforestation reached such magnitude that they practically wiped out the oak forest within a radius of several kilometers. The explanation for these facts lies in the constant need for wood to keep the metallurgical furnaces in operation.

The analyses Palynological demonstrated that the degradation of the ecosystem surrounding the town transformed the floristic composition of the environment to such an extent that the forests of ash, willow, poplar, alder, flowering reeds and filigree that protected the watercourses also disappeared permanently.

We are therefore faced with a clear example of the environmental impact caused by the intensive use of natural resources. When the forests disappeared several kilometers around them, they completely transformed the ecosystem and the base on which their own food resources were based disappeared. They had to travel more and more distance to hunt. When the soil that supported the forest disappeared, the mineral layers rich in polymetals originated by the underwater volcanism that created this territory, the Huelva Andévalo in the lower Paleozoic, emerged. This outcrop contaminated surface water and aquifers throughout the environment, adding another problem to the survival of that mining society.

The transformation of the environment is just one more chapter in the rich history of those first Alosno miners who were, for at least 200 years, an elite that mastered metallurgical techniques hitherto unknown in southwestern Europe.