New homes for the emigrants? Houses and landscapes in the debate about the limit between Cogotas I Culture-Early Iron Age in the Duero valley

This paper considers the historic process during the Bronze-to-Iron Age transition as the most important change conjuncture in the recent Prehistory of the Duero basin. It evolves in its characterisation from a discontinuous point of view, and it reconsiders the importance of the demographic fluctuations in order to understand the new social order established in the Early Iron Age (EIA). The article expects to complement the available historic interpretations which focus on the monumental record, like culture-historical and functionalist ones, and its aim is to exceed some of their limitations. To reach this object, approaches at very different scale are combined to give some information on the concept of home, as a material and symbolic environment of everyday experiences, which links both utilitarian and ritual spheres. First, the transformations in the domestic field are revised, defining a process of substitution of huts for houses, as the elemental social unit in the EIA. Second, the work considers the territorial dimension of the change gathering settlement data from different regions of Castile-Leon, which were subject to punctual and alternative immigration or abandonment dynamics. Both phenomena, being unleashed at the beginning of the first millennium BC, would be a symptom of complex structural shifts channelled through segmentary fission and reproduction dynamics. The discussed themes strengthen the idea of a drastic discontinuity between Cogotas I and the EIA communities. These were two different realities ordered by unsuited cosmological principles through a process of home renew as institution.