The Carpetan settlement of the Llano de la Horca in Santorcaz
Carpetan settlement at the dawn of Romanization
The Plain of the Gallows
It is located in the Madrid municipality of Santorcaz. It is an important Carpetan settlement from the end of the Second Iron Age on a meseted hill of about 14 hectares, at the head of a valley that connects with the fertile lands of the fertile plain and from which you have a wide visual domain over the paramo alcarreño.
The first moment of this Carpenane occupation is represented by a large open space, surrounded by large pole supports, together with some remains of small walls. Probably the Llano de la Horca was then a small enclave with very little population.
Subsequently, a series of rooms built with irregular stone baseboards locked with mud were erected on the site, on which adobe or mud walls rise. The soils were of clay or clay mixed with lime and hardened by the action of heat and use. The covers of these rooms would be made with interwoven branches and straws placed on a wooden beam frame.
In a third moment, the urban distribution became more complex. The different spaces of the town were delimited and configured, which already had an urban layout characteristic of the cities of the city
In the highest area of the oppidum a central plaza or space was opened in which the streets converged, forming blocks of large houses attached to its rear wall. Some of these streets were 5 meters wide. They were paved with pebbles and some still have the marks of the wheels of the cars that traveled through them.
The houses had a trapezoidal or rectangular plan and an average surface area of between seventy and one hundred square meters.
Its interior was divided into different spaces depending on the different activities that were carried out in the domestic environment: a first room, which would serve as an entrance hall and whose function was to serve as a workshop or a place for processing raw materials; then a second, larger room, with a central hearth (fire) and sometimes small auxiliary hearths, where sometimes a continuous bench appears attached to one of the walls, which would be the place where everyday life would take place.
From this room there is access to a rear room, which would function as a tool store or pantry. Pole supports have been documented in the entrance area, which seems to indicate that access to the house was done through a small porch, where a good part of life would take place, in order to take advantage of the light natural, which would be scarce inside the house.
Agriculture and livestock, along with hunting and other gathering activities, would be the main resources of the town. The trade would provide those products that could not be obtained in the immediate environment. The remains found in the Llano de la Horca confirm that a very dynamic trade existed in the settlement thanks to its geographical location. Most of the coins found during its excavation are Celtiberian and come from mints from the Middle Ebro Valley, which testifies to the strong relations with Celtiberia. Pieces of Campanian tableware imported from Campania and Etruria have also been found.
At a domestic level, the inhabitants of the Llano de la Horca developed a wide range of handicrafts to cover their basic needs. The elements of personal adornment and clothing are represented above all by different bronze fibulae, especially the so-called La Tene type and omega. The rings, buckles and other pieces complete the bronze ornaments, to which must be added the glassy paste necklace beads and glass bracelets.
Ceramic production would be one of the most relevant crafts. Some nozzle (ceramic tube to blow air into the furnace) proves the existence of furnaces and pottery in certain sectors of the deposit. Large kitchen and storage containers have been discovered. The decoration of some of these pieces has Celtiberian influences, as is the case of the Vaso de los Caballos, a pottery decorated with a frieze that represents five schematic horses with an undeniable numantino style.
Another highlight is the Glass of Taps, a large ceramic jar that features a frieze fully decorated with geometric motifs of horizontal, vertical and "S" shaped lines, on which the representation of various shaped figures seems to stand out. of birds, very stylized and of fantastic character, that remember, in mythology to the image of the griffins and in the nature, to the profile of the loon bird.
The final period of the settlement coincides with the only levels of collapse documented and coinciding in time with the Sertorian Wars (years 82-72 BC) that took place in the interior of the peninsula and which involved a change in the reorganization of the territory throughout the Iberian Peninsula. At that time, a final remodeling of the living spaces was carried out in the Llano de la Horca, which were being converted into areas of artisan work and the collection of materials. The town was languishing as the nearby city of Complutum (Alcalá de Henares) until it was finally abandoned around the last third of the XNUMXst century BC.
In 2012 the Archaeological and Paleontological Museum of the Community of Madrid organized an extensive exhibition on the site under the title "The last carpetanos: The oppidum of El Llano de la Horca".
Archaeological performance
The archaeological excavations and the geophysical and geomagnetic prospecting work carried out in El Llano de la Horca since 2001 by the Archaeological and Paleontological Museum of the Community of Madrid, have allowed us to document vestiges of a first occupation of the hill dated by radiocarbon in Full or Classic Bronze, which is represented by a small number of structures carved into the rock and clogged by ashy strata with hand-made pottery fragments and remains of flakes and flint sheets. A large irregularly shaped structure with a small associated circular oven and a very deep silo also correspond to this moment.
After a long period of abandonment of more than a millennium, the place was intensively occupied at the end of the Second Iron Age, between the middle of the third century and the first quarter or the middle of the first century BC. In this period an intense constructive activity and transformation of the spaces is developed, with a profound urban development of the settlement. After several phases of reorganization of the town, it will end up becoming a real oppidum (elevated place with natural defenses) with complex urban planning.
