Qualla: La Bastida de les Alcusses

La Bastida de les Alcusses: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tautintanes, CC BY-SA 3.0. Someone rolled the lead sheet tight, tucked it beneath a grinding stone in a back room, and never came back for it. More than two thousand three hundred years later, archaeologists carefully unrolled the little plaque and read a kind of ledger: a column of names, a quantity beside each, and many of them struck through. A debt paid, perhaps, or a debt collected. It survived because the Iberian town that produced it, high on a ridge near Moixent in Valencia, died young and left almost everything behind.

Image: Tautintanes | CC BY-SA 3.0

La Bastida de les Alcusses: A Town on the Ridge

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dorieo, CC BY-SA 4.0. La Bastida de les Alcusses crowns the southwest end of the Serra Grossa, 741 metres above the sea and 200 metres above the valley floor, where anyone approaching could be seen from a long way off. The settlement sprawled over four hectares, a long thin footprint some 650 metres b...

Image: Dorieo | CC BY-SA 4.0

La Bastida de les Alcusses: The New Pompeii

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown, CC BY-SA 4.0. Luis Tortosa first described the site in 1909, but the real work began in 1928, when the newly formed Servicio de Investigacion Prehistorica mounted four campaigns over three years. Diggers cleared some 250 rooms and pulled from the earth a startling haul of weapons, jewellery, a...

Image: Unknown | CC BY-SA 4.0

La Bastida de les Alcusses: Hearth, Street and Granary

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enrique Íñiguez Rodríguez (Qoan), CC BY-SA 3.0. Inside the walls, a single street ran east to west through the heart of the town, with lesser lanes branching off at right angles and a communal granary standing near the centre. Roughly ninety to a hundred and twenty houses crowded the slope, home to somewhere between 450 and 84...

Image: Enrique Íñiguez Rodríguez (Qoan) | CC BY-SA 3.0

La Bastida de les Alcusses: Fields, Flocks and Distant Trade

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos1966, CC BY-SA 4.0. These were farmers first. They raised barley, wheat and millet without irrigation, along with broad beans, peas, olives, vines, almonds and figs, and they worked the ground with wooden ploughs tipped in iron. The billhooks, sickles, hoes and rakes recovered here form one of the m...

Image: Carlos1966 | CC BY-SA 4.0

La Bastida de les Alcusses: The Warrior and the Fall

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carlos1966, CC BY-SA 4.0. This was a society of ranks. Wealth showed itself in jewellery, in the size of a house, in imported luxuries. The little bronze warrior stands naked to signal his heroism, gripping the curved Iberian falcata and a small round shield, a tall plume rising from his helmet, and offer...

Image: Carlos1966 | CC BY-SA 4.0