 Good morning, I'm very happy to be in this session and I would like, although I'm formally co-organizer of this session together with Law Martin and Holland, I must say that it's truly Martin and Holland and Law who have carried the bulk of the organization and I'm very happy to take part in this session dealing with resources which I think has an incredibly interesting array of papers which hopefully will be reflected in a publication that will appeal to a wide audience of readers. Well, the first of two papers that I'm going to contribute to in this session is titled Waterscapes in Antiquedas, paying exploring the role of water resources in settlement patterns, monumentality and connectivity. Water as a resource is something that usually does not leave strong archaeological traces in itself, but we can of course as archaeologists study the traces of hydraulic technology and with a little bit of luck maybe also gather historical information or epigraphic information that refers to the use of water resources in a given region. Personally, I have never attempted to study the importance of water resources in the region where I work, which is basically southern Spain, but a recent discovery has given us the opportunity actually has put us in the position to start a research dealing with the use of water resources in the past. So what I'm going to be presenting here is not a finished project with conclusions, but more like the setting for a research that we hope will be advancing in the next few years and will help us understand what the title of this paper says basically. So this study starts from a particular archaeological discovery that was made in 2005 at the Antiquedas Dolmens site. Antiquedas in Malaga in southern Spain is home to perhaps one of the largest megalithic sites in Iberia with two major late Neolithic monuments, Menga and Viera and one major copper age monument, the El Romeral Tholos. These three monuments perhaps especially Menga and El Romeral count themselves among the largest in Iberia and also the most impressive in their architectural design and in their form. These three monuments are together with two natural monuments have been listed by UNESCO in the World Heritage List two years ago. The natural monuments are two natural formations El Torcal which you can see there. It's a karstic landscape that has plenty of evidence of occupation since the early Neolithic in the region and is connected with the with the megalithic monuments and then La Peña de los Enamorados which you can see in this picture which is a very interesting mountain an archaeological site in itself that apart from its archaeology has a very conspicuous kind of a feature that makes it very very noticeable which is this strongly anthropomorphic silhouette so when you look at this mountain at sunrise or sunset what you see basically is a human face standing up and looking up so this may have been noticed I suspect we suspect must have been noticed by Neolithic inhabitants of this region and possibly earlier because there is a strong connection between this mountain and one of the megalithic monuments Menga which is the one I will be referring the most to so Menga quickly Menga is a dolmen which was well it's difficult to say that it was discovered because Menga which was erected possibly in the in the first three or four centuries of the fourth millennium BC we don't have a very precise chronology but what we have suggests that time horizon was never forgotten so it never went out of use it's it's been used constantly since the early the the late Neolithic and therefore it's it's maybe not so accurate to say that it was discovered okay but the first academic studies in the 1840s led to Menga becoming one of the most prominent megalithic monuments in Europe and it became somehow famous so in 1878 as you can see in that quote Jean-Destien claimed that it it's the most beautiful and perfect of the known dolmens or much later a hundred years later Glyn Daniel the British archaeologist claimed that Antequera and its dolmens should be ranked with Gavrines in Brittany in France or New Grange in Ireland and Stonehenge and Aith Green England and Mace Howe in Scotland and some of the great wonders of the Neolithic world so we have a major Neolithic site here okay I will not go into too many details about the description of Menga as a megalithic monument you can see some photos that I will pass rather quickly to give you an idea this is some cartography from a laser scan that was carried out some 12 years ago and that it's important of course to understand the architecture the details but also in case something catastrophic happens god forbid but that is a record so you can see some photos it's basically a single chamber monument with massive stones the stones of Menga combined together weighed some more than 800 tons metric tons to give you an idea this is the equivalent of two really big airplanes to you know jumbo planes fully loaded with fuel passengers and luggage one on top of each other right two of these planes this is how much the stone in this monument weights the largest of these stones which is the capstone at the back of the chamber weights 150 tons which is makes it a huge stone so I mean the only the feet of moving these stones and placing them in this monument was obviously something major at the time in the late Neolithic and massive massive made this monument incredibly famous in the region and you can suspect that this fame is correlated with the fact that the monument has never gone out of use and has always been used as I will show in a minute so you can see here some photos of Menga as a late Neolithic dolmen right so in 2005 this is the mound I will not dwell in details well some pictures are showing that the fact that it's a monument with an incredibly long biography that spans from the late Neolithic to the early 20th century so from you know polished hand axes to Roman pottery Roman tombs that have been found on the mound outside early medieval tombs that have been found outside the atrium of this monument early modern Spanish coins to Spanish civil war bullets that we found at the atrium because perhaps you know this is the latest episode in this long biography was actually pretty sad but some people were shot dead there during the early days of the Spanish civil war in 1936 so the archaeological record of this monument is an incredible mixture of things that go you know cover all of the past 6000 years basically so in 2005 a totally unexpected discovery was made in this monument because there was no record of this and this discovery was basically a water well this water well was found at the back of the chamber behind the first pillar and it's a very remarkable feature in itself it's almost 20 meters deep it go one and a half meters across and therefore it's like more or less a perfect cylinder although it's not so cylindrical at the base it becomes more like a truncated cone but still is basically a cylinder cutting the bedrock it goes all the way to the water table which is 20 meters down there and it provides drinking water with it provides good water the infill of this feature of this water well when it was excavated it was fully backfilled so to see this we had to excavate it right included several skeletons of animals and a lot of material culture so in itself the infill of this shaft is a very challenging archaeological record that we are studying now you can see the process of excavation of this shaft how it was challenging in terms of security and obviously not very nice to be down there you know and pretty claustrophobic so these pictures give you the idea I think all the way down to the water table where water filtrates from the walls naturally so as I said it's a it's a very good quality water resource because it provides drinking water all year round which is important in a region that is basically Mediterranean basin and therefore is subject to the cycles of yearly seasonal aridity and drought and also a region that it's prone to longer droughts so you can see here a little bit of an idea of all the finds we still haven't studied all these finds but it's mostly modern material so to cut the story short what we know let's keep this and come back now we look at the c14 chronology of the animal bones in this infill and it has provided a very precise chronology for the formation of this infill so basically we know that the water well was backfiled very probably deliberately in the 18th century AD because all the c14 dates as you can see in the diagram are incredibly consistent so somebody took the trouble of bringing what in fact is the equivalent of something like six dump trucks you know obviously there were no trucks in the 18th century so somebody had to carry this you know in buckets or whatever or with wheelbarrows and backfill this thing why did someone why did anyone anything like this but that's another problem I'm not going to go into but some other day or perhaps in the discussion if you want I can present my thinking about this so the water well was killed or backfilled in the 18th century for some reason but the fact remains you know that water well had been there possibly for a long time but how long we don't know when the well was made was built because there is no hard evidence to date it but if we look at the material culture associated to the well we see some interesting things for example outside in the 2005 excavation a roman tubulus which is a roman water pipe was found is that a coincidence because it's not a common find you may correct me but not a common find in my experience to find a roman pipe in a neolithic building so what were the romans doing there with pipes well if the water was in use perhaps the pipe makes sense right well something like this happens with other bits of evidence like for example there is evidence of some Andalusian cantoras of the 8th to 13th centuries ad and lake medieval flasks which were used to carry liquids in the 15th century ad or these modern alcarazas water jars used throughout the 16th and 17th centuries that have been found outside the dolmen and inside the dolmen particularly is interesting this alcarazas type water jar because we see them in some baroque spanish paintings of the 17th and 18th centuries like for example this one by furbaran which is a still um still dead what do you call it in in indian bodegón still life sorry thank you still life with pots or this very famous painting by velazquez el aguador which in spanish means the water carrier obviously in at that time in spain and in most of europe europe houses did not have running water so there were people carrying water in big jars and then selling it right so you see this is again something that make us suspect the the water will have been induced long before it was two minutes okay i'm really behind okay so this provides the background as i said for a number of questions why is there such a major hydrological feature in such a major megalithic monuments and at that point it's interesting to see to expand the picture and to look at the region and one feature of the antiquada region is that it has a lot of salty water so finding fresh water drinking water is not that easy because i mean and this map shows the toponymy of the region there's lots of site names and places in this region that are called arroyo salado which is in spanish would mean salty brook or la laguna salada the salty lake for example you know many names like this which are indirect proof of this so the water of the well as i said it's pretty drinkable i've drunk it and i didn't get sick and also it's interesting to notice that in this region precisely because of the abundance of salty waters salt has been a major resource at least since since antiquity we have references to the exploitation of salt from this site fuente de piedra stony source or stony spring in spanish with inscriptions referring to the exploitation of salt and there's also evidence of the exploitation of this resource since the neolithic at this other site fuente de camacho which is has been induced until recently in addition to this it's important to note that there's evidence of sanctuaries devoted to healing waters or even sacred waters all the way at least to the pre-roman period so in the in the third and second centuries bc this site nescania some 15 kilometers from the anteceda dolmens had this ancient water sanctuary with strong association to aquatic deities connected with fertility and healing so there are interesting precedents of a famous place bringing people in from a wider region because the waters were famous for his real or imagined healing powers the same applies to this other site at fuente de piedra which in the 16th century became very famous in this book las antigüedades de las ciudades de españa the antiquities of spain cities by ambrosio de morales in 1575 he claims that the best of all of spain springs seem to be that of anteceda due to its strength against the terrible disease of kidney stone well as you know before basically before the 20th century medicine relied a lot on magic and you know things like placebo effect and so on so places with good quality water could become very very important in fact the fuente de piedra water in the 16th century was exported to the spanish overseas colonies of the time including the americas and southern italy's as it was so famous with certification issued by the local authorities to prevent fraud so that the water was certified with its origins okay so well menga water well versus waterscapes and i'm finishing some observations and ideas as i said to lay out our forthcoming and ongoing research on this site iberia's largest megalithic monument mega menga is associated to a remarkable hydraulic feature like no water a water well there are subtle indications that mengas water well may have been in use for a long time perhaps since antiquity perhaps also even earlier oops this is out of place the anteceda region the location and characteristic of menga as well suggests this was no ordinary water well but perhaps one with religious or symbolic connotations was it a healing water or sacred water well there's one single fact that makes you actually think this instead of digging 20 meters to reach the water table barely a hundred meters further from the hill where the monument was built you only have to dig three meters to get to the water right so these people chose to dig 20 meters to get the water the anteceda region presents a potent history of water sanctuaries famous healing waters and salty waters that have contributed to the region's connectivity at least from antiquity but possibly earlier in a region with plenty of salty water fresh water has been of particular importance determining settlement patterns and land control with some fresh water springs being celebrated as sacred so the making of the menga water well and its subsequent history must be seen in light of the powerful waterscapes of this region thank you