Bone
6th-5th c. BC
Empúries (L’Escala – Alt Empordà)
The graves in the cemeteries surrounding Empúries suffered looting well into the 20th century. The looters were looking for objects they could sell on the antique collectors’ market. They were interested in the grave goods that had been buried with the deceased and the cinerary urns when they came across cremation graves. The remains of the bodies, buried or cremated, were not of interest to them. Who would buy bones or ashes?
Sometimes the looters found inhumation tombs in which the deceased had been buried wearing bracelets on their forearms. They did not waste time removing the bracelets, but instead ripped the forearm from the skeleton and sold the whole thing. Our museum preserves eight forearms (radius and ulna) bearing bronze bracelets. According to the documentation, they were bought on two occasions in 1896.
Today we present one bearing 22 bracelets that covered practically the whole forearm. They are small flat stems with a decoration formed by groups of incised oblique lines. We can estimate the chronology thanks to similar finds. A bracelet with identical decoration, although much smaller, was found in Tomb 123 at the cremation necropolis of Can Bech de Baix (Agullana). In the cremation necropolis of Bergerie Hermet in Calvisson (Gard, France), Tombs 3 and 4 contained 22 and 6 bracelets, respectively, with the same typology and decoration as ours. In both cases they have been dated to between 550 BC and the early years of the 5th century BC, a chronology that seems perfectly valid for our examples.
In this period, burial was the most common funeral ritual among the first Greek residents of Empúries. The bracelets, on the other hand, are purely indigenous in nature. And now, the big question is: Was the person buried with all these bracelets Iberian or Greek?
