 First of all, I apologize from Juan Antonio Quiroz, who is unfortunately in another session now dealing with medieval villages. It's very unfortunate that they put all the medieval stuff together at the same time. Anyway, the title is Chicken Pots and Ritual Deposits. And as I described the deposits, I am sure that you are going to be remembering very much what you've been presenting about Hungary and many other building deposits farms all over Europe. But in this case, it's a kind of a particular case. I don't know if it's because it's the first one known in this region. Or you will see, it's a kind of a special case. And I think that it can only be interpreted in the framework of folk religion and in the very contextual case of the Basque country in this period, as you will see. That is work. First, just a little definition of what I understand as folk religion. In the literature, you will find folk, popular, vernacular, these are all synonyms. I'm going to use folk religion. And I'm using the definition given by Yoder many years ago, saying that folk religion is the totality of all those views and practices of religion that exist among the people apart from and alongside the strictly theological and intergeal forms of the official religion. And I would argue that folk religion is consubstantial of all practices of official religion. Bear in mind, unlike Central Europe or the Hungarian area or the Baltic republics, Spain in the high Middle Ages was fully either Christian or Muslim, or there were Jewish populations. But until very recently, seeing this sort of pagan or outsider sorts of expressions of religion were very unlikely to happen, or they were not very understood. In recent periods, there is a big debate on medieval religiosity, actually. And now they are understanding that there's a more dynamic, hybrid, multi-dimensional unchanging. Despite being liturgical forms of religion, either Christian, either Muslim, actually religion is much more fluid and changing. And this has allowed for the appearance of a new framework to interpret this whatever we want to call them, ritual, special, intentional, structured, ABGs for the new archaeologists in medieval archaeology. When it comes to Spain, or I would argue for the whole of the Igrian Peninsula, medieval ritual deposits have been very neglecting, as you have been mentioning. They appear generally in great literature, or they don't appear at all, and you need to communicate with each other to find out if there are other examples. And in general, when they have been mentioned, they have been generally linked to paganism, to magic. Somehow they have been understood. They have been just regarded as very marginal, non-important. There is very little discussion about it. Now, the case that I'm going to present to you is a very particular case. Very well, I have now five different sites within a very small geographical region. This is the Basque Country, in the Igrian Peninsula in the north of Spain. They are all in the southern part of the Basque Country. You see that the distance between the five sides is like 15 kilometers, one from each other. This is a table summarizing the deposits. The names of the sites are Torrendejo, and Radier 44, Sabateri 34, Zavaya, and Mavilla. Don't worry, I'm not going to explain all of this. I'm just going to draw your attention to the fact that they are all of them. Very well dated to the 12th, 13th century, so they happen in a very short period of time, as I said, very close to each other geographically. They all consist of remains of chicken. It's a bird, but I think that in most cases they are chicken, covered by an inverted vessel. If the vessel is not inverted, it's covered by another vessel, but in any case, it's sort of a structure in tension at the position. And they always appear inside a pit done on purpose to contain this hole, this pot. Sorry. Very recently, I've heard of a sixth example in the city of Vittoria last days in the excavation of what today is the cathedral of the city. And also dated to the 12th century. So I have six examples, very, as I said, following a very distinct pattern. I think that it is a ritual deposit. They are ritual deposits. They are all a restructure deposits. The pits are purposely made. The pots are deliberately inverted. In all cases, unlike what you were mentioning in Hungary, these are always related to public buildings. They all appear in churches, in the foundations of the city walls, and these sort of magnificent public buildings. They don't appear in a domestic context. And they are either related to the construction of the building or the foundation of the buildings, but also renovations of the buildings, extending one wall or adding a different room to the building, and so on. The materials that are found are very consistent. They are chickens and they are pots. As I said, they are geographically very close to each other and of very similar chronology. And I think that this all suggests that they are rituals. There is a consistent pattern suggesting that they are rituals. Although, there are variations. As I said, most of them, they are inverted, but some of them are not, and in this case, they are covered. In one case, there's no chicken inside. It was just empty. We didn't find anything inside. In one case, on top of the base of the inverted pot, there was a coin. You were mentioning earlier the importance of the metallic objects in these sort of rituals, perhaps. But despite these differences, there are some common characteristics. Now, the fact that there are variations made me think that perhaps it was not a normalized or institutionalized practice, but there were variations accepted. So it was a public ritual. But perhaps the rules that needed to be followed were not very clear. Now, a few pictures showing you the materials that I found. A very interesting thing is that they don't seem to be special materials at all. And for what I know from building deposits in the south of Europe, in Mediterranean Europe, there is only one case known in Italy, in a church. And the special deposit was actually bruce, very well-decorated, very expensive at that time. This is absolutely different. There are no special materials. The pots are very similar to the rest of the pots that are found at the same sites. I am not a specialist in pottery, so don't ask me any technical details about it. Here are some pictures. The only special decoration found is this mark in this one, which they told me that maybe the potter's mark. But you tell me. I have no clue. Regarding the chicken, again, there is no special materials. In most cases, it's the almost complete skeleton of the chicken. They are very badly preserved in most cases. Unfortunately, I cannot determine if they were specifically slaughtered or sacrificed for this purpose. Chicken at this point in all these sites is not particularly frequent, considered to other species. But it's a very common animal. It's not that they chose an eagle, for example, to do this. Now, what for? The fact that they are using birds is not new. In ancient times, birds were very used for any sorts of ritual activities, including sacrifice, for example, for very specific gods, like Mercury or Hermes, Apollo or Mithra. They were using ornithomancy, avianorality, and so on. And we do know from other areas in Europe that these practices survived very well, at least to the end of the Middle Ages. So I think that there is no reason to think that they didn't survive until later times. The use of the coin on top of one particular case makes me think of the important potropi role of metallic objects in the ritual in general. Very well-documented ethnographically. As I said, most of the vessels were inverted. And the remains were buried. They were not left open-air. And these ethnographically suggest that they were a way of communicating with the other world, whatever this world is. Another important thing to think about is the audience of this ritual. And I think that in this case is a public sphere. It wasn't private, although the audience was probably restricted for the people that were attending the act of deposition and burial of these remains. There was no distinctive sign or anything suggesting that there was something special buried there. But the fact that they are in public buildings makes me think that it was a public event, a public event. Ephemeral and without intergenerational communication. Only the people that were there at the moment would remember it. This is an export of one of the, as it is in the museum. Now, as I said, they all appear in context related to the construction renovation of foundations of public buildings at the churches of city walls. They do belong to this category known in historiography as Building Foundation Ritual of Bao Opa, or many different names that they are going to be listing. All ethnographical examples show that this type of ritual deposits were aimed at gaining permission or cooperation from the supernatural powers to protect the building or to gain permission to construct the building in the place. They appear across continents, cultures, and centuries, and I, for example, in this case, I would argue that it's very unlikely that a Hungarian peasant came to the Basque country to bury his children there. Despite the occurrences at the same time, I very much doubt it. For the Middle Ages, these sort of Bao Opa building deposits are known in central Europe, northern countries, UK, France, eastern countries, but not in the Mediterranean, as far as I know, apart from this very particular example that they told you about the Brugge in Italy. I don't know if it's because it has been neglected. It has not been reported. I don't know, but as far as I know, this example that I'm showing you is the first one. In Davidian Peninsula, similar deposits are known for the Iron Age and Roman sites. Perhaps it is an ancient tradition adapted or reinterpreted to new cosmologies in response to new socio-political scenes, perhaps, but between the Roman times in the Liberian Peninsula to the 12th century here, there is a big gap. I don't know what happened in the middle. What I think is important is that if this is an ancient tradition that has been adapted or reinterpreted, makes me think that perhaps the fact that they were reproducing ancient rituals was allowing, giving power to those people who were doing it. Perhaps these people were representing themselves as guardians of the past. And as a couple of us mentioned, folk religion is a political construct that can be only understood contextually. And this brings me to this slide of interpreting these particular deposits in the Basque Country at this particular period. During these centuries, the 13th centuries, the church was in a powerful but still unstable situation. New parishes were being created, both in rural sites and urban sites. There was some movement of the bishop chairs in the area from one side to another. There were some fights, internal fights for the power. At the same time, the different kings were fighting for the control of the territory, specifically by the foundation of new towns in the area. And all these also were accompanied by the whole reorganization of the rural world. So there were many different new settlement hierarchies. People were kind of arguing with each other to see who was getting the control of the territory. So I think that these conflicts between neclesiastical powers, the local secular elites, and the kings led to a period in which social and political communities were being confirmed, negotiated, and reaffirmed. And in this context, I think that the fact that somebody was using this ancient, perhaps ancient ritual for constructing public buildings that are full of meaning regarding identity and community is a very interesting thing that they are using these particular things for churches, city walls, and things like that. So I have this hypothesis that the construction of the public buildings provided some sort of cohesion to the communities, and that these particular rituals legitimized their realization and the leadership of the promoters of the buildings. In a way, these building deposits, these rituals were being used as a way to legitimize the social order from the bottom up in a way that official religion doesn't, which does the other way around, from top to bottom. And I like very much this idea of Kapalosa in that folk religion is actually a way to undermine the monopoly of social display by the clergy. I'll leave it there, I think it might be the case, nothing else. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you.