Prehistory and Antiquity: from Atapuerca to the Visigothic kingdom
What the exam tests
This domain runs from the first human occupation of the peninsula to the collapse of the Visigothic kingdom in 711. Local weight falls on the Sierra de Atapuerca (Burgos), on the Iron Age peoples of the Duero basin, and on the two colonising processes that reshaped Iberia: Roman and Visigothic.
Chronology you must be able to defend
- Atapuerca: Sima del Elefante (~1.2 Ma, earliest western European evidence); Gran Dolina - Homo antecessor (~800,000 BP); Sima de los Huesos - Homo heidelbergensis (~430,000 BP, the largest accumulation of human fossils in the world).
- Palaeolithic art: Franco-Cantabrian (Altamira's polychrome bison) versus Levantine art (small schematic figures, hunting scenes) - different chronology and distribution.
- Metallurgy: El Argar (Bronze Age, southeast); Cogotas I in the Meseta (boquique-incised pottery); Castro culture (northwest, Iron Age); Celtiberians and Vettones in the interior.
- Colonisers: Phoenicians (Gadir, 8th c. BC), Greeks (Emporion), Carthaginians (Barcids; Saguntum, 219 BC).
- Roman conquest: 218 BC landing at Emporion; 197 BC division into Citerior and Ulterior; Lusitanian war (Viriatus, 147–139 BC); Numantia, 133 BC; Cantabrian–Asturian wars, 29–19 BC.
- Visigoths: Vouillé (507) pushes them out of Gaul; Toledo becomes the political centre; Leovigild unifies the territory; 589 Third Council of Toledo, Reccared's conversion from Arianism; Liber Iudiciorum (654); Guadalete, 711.
Worked example
"Explain the significance of Atapuerca for the study of human evolution." A full-mark answer does not list finds. It (1) places the sites in a stratigraphic sequence, (2) names species with dates, (3) explains why each matters - antecessor as an early European lineage with cut-marked bones suggesting cannibalism; heidelbergensis at Sima de los Huesos as the earliest deliberate depositing of the dead - and (4) closes with heritage recognition (UNESCO, 2000) and the ongoing revision of the "Out of Africa" model.
Mark-losing traps
- Compressing a million years into one undifferentiated "Stone Age".
- Wrong dates for the Atapuerca sites, or calling antecessor a Neanderthal.
- Presenting Romanisation as uniform: deep in Baetica and the coast, thin in the northwest.
- Confusing 218 BC (arrival) with 197 BC (provincial organisation).
- Claiming the Visigoths were Catholic from the start: Arianism lasted until 589.
- Describing 711 as an instantaneous, total conquest.