MARQ EXHIBITION
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Around 1904, the Jesuit priest Julio Furgús made a spectacular discovery in the so-called "Ladera de San Antón", located a few kilometres north of the town of Orihuela: the tomb of a woman dressed in silver spirals, a copper knife wrapped in a linen handkerchief, a metal awl, a handmade ceramic vessel and a set of very small perforated gold cones.
Furgús had already extracted a large number of ancient objects from this site, with which he had built up an extraordinary collection at the nearby Colegio de Santo Domingo, where he worked as a teacher. Although he always believed it to be a cemetery - he found more than 600 tombs there, according to his writings - by his own time other distinguished archaeologists, such as Luís Siret, had already realised that San Antón was really a large village of the so-called El Argar Culture.
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4000 years ago, the Argaric people could be considered one of the most advanced Bronze Age societies in Western Europe. In large settlements such as San Antón, the elite resided and were buried, distinguished from the rest of the population by the copper and bronze weapons and the gold and silver ornaments with which they were buried. Connected to the Mediterranean trade circuits of the Bronze Age, San Antón occupied a strategic position in the middle of the Segura river valley, which even then served as the main communication route between the coast and the interior. It is therefore not surprising that Furgús found a large number of bronze weapons and silver and gold ornaments there during his excavations.
Furgús died suddenly in 1909, and the small museum in Santo Domingo was dismantled in the 1930s. The collection is now spread over several museums: the Museu d'Arqueologia de Catalunya in Barcelona, the Museo Comarcal de Orihuela and the MARQ in Alicante.
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The 75 tiny, perforated gold cones (only 42 remain today) discovered by Furgús in that grave are extraordinary, as more than a century after their discovery they are still unique in the Iberian Peninsula. By contrast, they were very common in Eastern Europe at the time, where they were made of bronze or gold and sewn to decorate gala clothes. This is also how they must have arrived here from somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains: sewn onto the collar of a dress given as a luxurious and exotic gift, or perhaps covering the body of a high-ranking young woman from the other side of Europe.
We cannot know this today. However, ancient DNA has shown that Argaric society, like many others in Bronze Age Europe, was exogamous and patrilocal: women left their home villages to marry and reside with their husbands, thus establishing links between families and, in the case of the elites, seeking international trade alliances with other powerful families.
