Professor Jean Guilaine reviews our Montelirio book in the June 2017 issue of Trabajos de Prehistoria, Spain’s leading Prehistory journal. Professor Guilaine, a renowned authority in European Late Prehistory gives a roundly positive review to the book: “Everything evoked in this masterful book borders uniqueness and excess: the site itself (Valencina de la Concepción, at over 400 ha, is the largest Copper Age settlement in Western Europe), the monument analysed (the largest tholos in southern Iberia after El Romeral), the grave goods (the largest amounts of ivory and amber found at any site in Iberia; the exceptional technical quality of the artefacts), and finally, the human remains (particularly a group of women, submerged in a spiritual or esoteric setting dominated by the color red, resulting from habitual use of cinnabar, which perhaps may have led to some of their deaths). When closing the final pages of this collective work (with 22 chapters by 45 authors from a range of countries) the reader is left with the feeling that the historiography of the European Copper Age has just experienced a leap ahead, considering how the skilfully organised interdisciplinarity can help us better approach the complexity of societies at the end of the Neolithic.”
