Bronze Age Man Under a Hearth in Spain May Reflect a Ritual
Someone dug a pit beneath a hearth, laid a man inside, pushed a large stone into his mouth and sealed him between two floors. His face ended up 1 centimeter below the surface, right where people walked.
Marco Mazón Gomariz of the Complutense University of Madrid published a study of this burial in the religious studies journal Ilu. The man, labeled AY5, was found in Room H9 of the first residential complex at La Almoloya, an El Argar site in southeastern Spain. The layer dates to 1750 to 1550 B.C.E., the third phase of the El Argar culture.
A strange burial
AY5 was about 40 years old and stood roughly 1.63 meters tall. His bones show he did not do heavy labor. His lower body lay beneath a large hearth, and he had no grave goods, unlike most El Argar burials. His skeleton shows no wounds, though a cut throat or strangling would leave no mark on bone. The excavators called him “the enemy” and read the burial as punishment.
A ritual instead?
Mazón Gomariz sees magic instead of simple punishment. He thinks the setup was meant to control forces of chaos the man was believed to carry. He draws parallels from Mesopotamia and Egypt, where kings and pharaohs were shown trampling enemies, and artists put prisoners on doorframes, floors and footstools so every step crushed an enemy. Egyptians saw those enemies as agents of chaos, and trampling them kept order in place.
He also points to Mesopotamian sorcery, where spells often targeted the mouth of a demon or sorcerer to cut off speech, and to a man at Hasanlu in Iran buried with a cylinder seal in his mouth. In his reading, the stone in AY5’s mouth would silence him in life and as a ghost.
The room and the man
Room H9 was a dim semi-basement of about 70 square meters with benches for around 50 people and a podium 1 meter high. The hearth covered more than 4 square meters and sat in a pit, which no other hearth at the site in this phase did. Visitors reached the hall by a winding route, hidden from the main street. The author reads it as a sacred space.
DNA showed AY5 had a third-degree genetic link to two people buried at the site, so he belonged to the community. Mazón Gomariz suggests he was a priest or official who fell from grace. The author calls his idea strictly hypothetical, because nobody knows the man’s offense or rank.
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