 My name is Joaquín Jiménez and first of all thank you to the organizers of the session for allowing us to present our communication. I am going to speak about the settlement patterns in the central and southern area of the Iberian Peninsula. It is our intention to better contribute to the understanding of the evolution and the social meaning of cultural behavior of the first agricultural societies. To do so we have used the existing data coming from excavations and systematic survey programs performed in the study area. Mainly we will use radiocarbon dates from the excavation sites and there is settlement information from the surveys. In order to create a chronological framework to organize all the information we have divided the five millennium object of analysis in cultural periods. These cultural periods contain a series of important events, climatic and economical which will be crossed with the analysis to look for possible causalities. We have used the radiocarbon information coming from the excavations of the archaeological sites in the area. We have filtered and audited the initial sample of 394 dates and we have rejected all those samples coming from aggregates and those which are not coming from a clear and tropic context. Also we have rejected those with standard deviation bigger than 100 and after the filtering process we have 294 dates, all coming from singular samples and from well-known contexts. Also calibrating the dates we have calculated the SCDPD or soon calibrated density probability distribution which will be used for us as a demographic proxy. To refine the problems associated with the calibration curve we also have calculated the SCDRD or soon calibrated date range distribution. It provides less noisy panoramic without the distortion caused by the calibration. We also have used the settlement information coming from the systematic survey programs. There are 802 sites in the whole area with 61 offering radiocarbon datations at different levels. In order to calculate the site density by cultural period we will only use habitat or settlement sites, open air and caves and we have used only open air sites to calculate the occupied area by cultural period due to difficulties associated with cultural attribution of caves in many cases. The sample is uneven in the study areas can be seen in the graph. The surveys have focused in finding different cultural periods through the record so we have decided to divide the area in three parts in order to control the research bias. To test the biasing in the radiocarbon sample we have crossed the SCDPD information from the area with that coming from the settlement and we have realized that it introduces some issues but in general we can observe the same tendencies but with a magnitude difference. The comparison is problematic due to the different scales of comparison between both information. There are two significant anomalies. We can see a big gap oriatus found between the 6.2 event and which is also present in other areas in the peninsula as the instant as Portugal for instance and also we can find a distortion in the transition from Neolithic 1A and Neolithic 1B from the regional phase. The settlement evolution with some rise and fall events seems to follow an exponential growth pattern as can be seen in the evolution maps which are covering a period from Mesolithic MRA and till the Bronze Age in the last one. We can also extract some general characteristics from the observed info about the sites. The location of the settlements of the first Neolithic groups is always near water courses, rivers and ravines especially, and humid areas as lakes, infertile and light soils always. One of the main recognized traits for this prehistoric phase in this area at least is the low work investment dedicated to the building of the housing. These houses used to be grouped with big spacing between them and always nearby the cultivation areas. Sometimes the settlements are surrounded by ditches with big work investment and the variables corresponding to this long period are individual and are placed mainly in case with modest great goods. From the 5th millennium BC on we can observe a series of transformations which could be considered a reorganization in the territory occupation and also in the exploitation system. The result is a different settlement pattern which is shown in the popping up of huge size settlements in the lowlands of the valleys which contains in many cases storing pits or silos and are also common in these settlements surrounding ditches as the limiting structures and habitat frontier. One of the traits of this settlement is the big amount of excavated structures that we have said before in the ground. All of which shows different morphologies and sizes. Their function is also unknown and they used to contain garbage from the time they were amortized and in some cases they are used as burial pits. The remains of the settlement structures correspond to fragments of mud with vegetal imprints and pole holes. It is difficult to estimate how many cottages would form the town whose extension is defined by the dispersion of the structures. The silos settlement will be a constant in the archaeology record in the zone until the stone constructions generalization around the third millennium ending. In the calcolithic the presence of copper fragments is not uncommon in the sites, some of which are coming from the southwestern part of the peninsula showing the presence of long range exchange networks. Also the presence of elaborated flint arrowheads becomes common in the record at this moment. The number of sage on material and social transformation are radical. Little villages and housing acquire a new disolization and the settlement pattern profoundly changes and the villages settle in the high part of the hills and mountains. This tendency was already present in other peninsula zones with the presence of stone as a construction material getting normal. This increment of work investment tells us about a certain will of staying in the territory. At the same time we can interpret certain settlement typology attending to their dimensions and location. Domestic units present radical morphological changes opposite to the simple cottage habitat from the previous periods, freestanding, disposed in extension and dispersed, rectangular or square floor housing appear in this moment concatenating each other to create dense occupation units. Internally these habitation spaces are drafted with partitions which compartmentalize the space. This new way to understand the space that puts the action in the fragmentation and the aggregation could be a reflection of strong social changes. The settlement patterns reflect an attempt to guarantee access to agricultural resources and at the same time pursues a growing security search. The magnitude of all these changes would be indicative of a new social reality in which the domestic unit would turn into the main socialization space. In addition part of the buried would be integrated into the settlement in some cases. We can talk of two different areas in the Bronze Age of the area of our study, the Bronze Valenciano and the Argar culture. The presence of metal objects becomes common in this moment and in the southern area even gold and silver are present sometimes. The arrival of Sicilian amber in the Mediterranean Peninsula started in the 4th millennium BC at least as Murillo Barroso's study pointed recently. Big presence of amber can be registered in southwestern part of the peninsula, especially in Valenciana de la Concepción site and southeastern side in Los Millares. In the very infinite context, after an apparent decline in the use of amber, Baltic succinate appears to replace the Sicilian cimetite. In the Iberian Peninsula, in the second half of the second millennium BC, the more insignificant influx of the Baltic amber will take place from the turn of the millennium on. Also the presence of Asiatic Iberia is also confirmed in the peninsula since the last part of the Neolithic or Neolithic 2B of the regional phase. We know there were links between the peninsula and North Africa by the words of Harrison and Chapman, and it is plausible that Sicilian amber reached Iberia through exchanges with North Africa, but the ivory is also present in our study area, being more common in the Bronze and Calcolitic ages. Its presence points necessarily to long-distance exchange networks, no matter the route used to do so. As some works point, the existence of sailing boats capable of long-range travels through the Mediterranean in the area is more than probable. The routes are a mystery, but they should pass through central Mediterranean somehow. The amber appears at southern Iberian sites and its distribution is similar to that of ivory objects. We are testing that both materials reached the Iberian Peninsula following the same or similar channels. As we have seen in this work in progress, all clues suggest the possibility of a relationship between the central Mediterranean, Sicilian in this case, and the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. It could represent an stimulating research line for the future in order to better understand the social exchange dynamics in the framework of recent Mediterranean prehistory. Thank you for your patience.