Old? These neighbours of ours are ancient. Literally

It was surprisingly exciting, meeting some old – really old – neighbours. 

Well, we didn’t exactly meet them. But at least we found the place where they used to live.

The woods near our home are the most precious feature of our district of Valencia. They were, for instance, our invaluable escape valve during the worst of the Covid confinement. The restrictions were pretty tough here in Spain, and the valve provide a real balm for our souls.

Slowly, we’ve been getting to know the place. It’s taken months, partly because it’s pretty large, partly because once I’ve found a place I like, I tend to want to go back there again and again. Eventually, though, we started exploring the reaches of the woods furthest from our home. Which is how we found another home, far more curious than ours. The ancient neighbours’ one.

To be honest, it’s two or three kilometres away. Practically neighbours.

It’s on a hill. Ninety-nine metres above sea level. Instinctively, I wished they’d piled on a few more stones to reach a round hundred. That’s not really fair, though, seeing they built the place the nearly four millennia before the metre was invented.

Reconstruction of how the Lloma de Betxi
must have looked when it was still lived in

It’s a fine house. Just one storey high, but strongly built of good, solid stone, cut from the sides of the hill the residents terraced to grow their food. They’d even faced the stone with plaster made from mud.

It’s a good spot. The height kept it free from humidity and well-ventilated by breezes. It’s only a couple of hundred metres from the Turia river, the mighty local waterway we enjoy as they did. 

For the kids or, probably, the women, that must have been a pain, however. For anyone who had to schlep the heavy buckets to the river, and struggle back with them full of water, to pour into the cisterns by the house. 

“Why me, again?” you can imagine a boy saying, “why can’t he do it for once?” pointing at one of his brothers.

“He’s too young,” patiently explains – who? Grandma, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

It’s easy to picture the look of disgust on the faces of the kids stuck with that chore, isn’t it? I know I hated it on camping trips with the family as a kid.

I may have exaggerated slightly in my description of the house. It’s been well restored by archaeologists, but much of the plastering has come off the walls down the years. Well, the millennia. And the roof’s gone. As have the people. Apart, that is, from the two whose graves have been found nearby. One of them was tied up into a foetal position and buried with a dog, presumably because he was a man (yes, it was a man) of honour in the family. 

Personally, I felt it looked a lot more uncomfortable than honourable.

I say family because that’s what it almost certainly was. There were maybe 15 or 20 people living there, in an extended family grouping. When Danielle and I first found the place, we thought it was a fortress of some kind. The archaeologists have stuck up information panels all around the place, so we learned that it was built in the bronze age, but when we went back with a guide, he quickly knocked down the idea that it was military in any way.

“Too low,” he told us, “good views but nothing like the field you’d want for a hill fort. And, above all, there are no walls.”

It’s probably just our prejudices that made us think of it as defensive. We’re so used to people imposing their will on others by force that we assume that was the motivation of the people back then too.

Sadly, that isn’t entirely wrong. A while back, I wrote about the Neolithic peoples of our region, and the wall paintings they made. These were dark-skinned hunter gatherers. But the ones who built the hill settlement near us were the descendants of at least a couple of waves of colonists later.

The wall-painting guys met their fate when a bunch of pale-skinned people showed up from the Steppes, probably from present-day Ukraine. They became early agriculturalists, but they certainly had swords – or at least spears and bows – before they had ploughshares. You can see it in the DNA records. Scientists can distinguish inheritance on the male and female lines of descent, and the Neolithic heritage dies out within a few generations from the male line.

What does that tell us? Invaders wiped out most of the males who were already there. Then they ‘married’ the women, insofar anything that involved so little consent can be called marriage.

All this rather makes a mockery of people ranting on about immigration today. They are descended from people who immigrated, wave after wave of them, and many in far nastier ways than the present ones. The poor characters struggling across the Mediterranean in their open boats aren’t led by powerful, well-armed warriors.

The inhabitants of the settlement near us, the Lloma de Betxí, were probably pale skinned. They were agriculturalists, growing crops and cultivating cattle. Poor guys. Work, solid back-breaking labour, was invented with the agricultural revolution and has kept going right down to the present day. And these guys were doing it.

They were there from 1800 to 1300 before our era. What stopped them living there in the end? We know that too. There are clear marks, still, of a terrible fire. It looks like most of the people left, though there are signs of continued inhabitation by a small number of people, in a reduced area of the house, after the fire.

Some older inhabitants, I can’t help imagining. Not prepared to move elsewhere. Who clung on in an outbuilding of the burned structure that had been their home. Gradually they died out, in a place abandoned since their time.

The Lloma de Betxi today

Leaving us a moving sight to wonder at, hundreds of generations later.