Time, Sustainability, and ‘Collapse’ in the Iberian Copper Age Mega-Sites

Abstract Mega-sites were a remarkable feature of the Iberian Copper Age, as recent research has revealed. As a particular expression of the large low-occupation-density settlements, some of them probably had an aggregational rather than residential character. Borrowing concepts from scientific ecology such as ‘sustainability’, ‘resilience’, and ‘collapse’, in this paper we examine the temporality of this phenomenon, which spanned almost two thousand years, from the mid-fourth to the early second millennia bc . Radiocarbon dates from seven mega-sites (Alcalar, Perdigoes and Porto Torrao in Portugal and Camino de las Yeseras, Marroquíes Bajos, La Pijotilla, and Valencina in Spain) are modelled in order to examine their start and end dates as well as their internal cycles. Their development and eventual demise are examined under the light of external variables such as climate fluctuation, resource depletion, and breakdown of exchange networks. The abandonment of these large settlements marked the end of a long era in which monumentalized central places served as the stage in which social inequality and collective action balanced each other out for centuries.