Abstract:

The urban character of the Iberian society has been recognized for several decades, and has also been confirmed archaeologically by excavations developed since the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, there are different opinions on the origin of this civilization. Diffusionist stances have conceived the indigenous city as a phenomenon promoted by populations coming from the eastern Mediterranean, to wit the Phoenicians and the Phocaeans. The «postcolonial» approaches did not address the problem because, being mainly focused on the cultural aspects of interactions between natives and «colonizers», they did not examine the changes in infrastructure. Here we support a different viewpoint, namely that the emergence of the Iberian cities from the second half of the 6thcentury BC onwards is an essentially local phenomenon, which is linked to the formation of the first states and must be explained in terms of demographical and technological shifts that dramatically changed the production relations.