A Large Iron Age House in Spain May Have Housed Elites

Long before Rome ruled central Spain, someone on a hilltop near Toledo lived well enough to fill a home with pottery from faraway shores. Archaeologists now think they know whose house it was, or at least what kind of people lived there.

A big building on a fortified hill

The site is Cerro del Gollino, in the town of Corral de Almaguer in the province of Toledo. It is an oppidum, a fortified Iron Age settlement, covering about 18 hectares across several walled enclosures. People lived there from the late 3rd century BC until the first half of the 1st century BC, and the hill saw a later medieval reoccupation too.

In 2026, a team from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and the University of Oxford ran the project’s third excavation campaign. Archaeologist Pablo Sánchez de Oro directs the work. This season focused on a structure the team calls Building B. Reports describe it as a construction of large dimensions, and the excavators think it may have been the residence of local elites.

Pottery from across the Mediterranean

The dig produced an abundant set of finds. Among them were numerous imported ceramics from several parts of the Iberian Peninsula and the wider Mediterranean, alongside high-quality pottery made locally. According to the project’s backers, these finds show that the community took part in the economic and cultural exchange networks of its time.

The people of this region belonged to the Carpetani, an Iron Age society of central Iberia. The new season adds detail to how Carpetanian communities lived at the end of the Second Iron Age, and how far their connections reached.

An international dig

Archaeologists first excavated Cerro del Gollino in 1985 and 1986, and work only resumed in 2024. This year, students and researchers came from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the University of Oxford, McMaster University in Canada and Duke University in the United States. The Diputación de Toledo, the Corral de Almaguer town council, a local cultural association and the Fundación Rico Rodríguez supported the campaign. The team also held an open day for visitors.

The reports do not yet give exact measurements for Building B or name the specific places the imported pottery came from. Those details should come as the team studies this season’s material.

Sources

• ENCLM: Hallan nuevas claves de los carpetanos en las excavaciones del Cerro del Gollino (5 October 2026)
• Europa Press: Los últimos trabajos arqueológicos en el Cerro del Gollino apuntan a una gran construcción vinculada a élites carpetanas
• Universidad Autónoma de Madrid: Cerro del Gollino archaeological research project