Social elite from the power centre of Late Antique Gallaecia? Revisiting San Bartolomé de Rebordáns (Tui, Spain)

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss novel and existing archaeological data from the San Bartolomé de Rebordáns site (Tui, Spain) that suggest the importance of Tude as a place of power in the Late Antique Sueve Gallaecia (411–585 CE) and later, in the Iberian Visigoth kingdom (585–711 CE). Here, we apply a combination of complementary techniques: archaeological survey, absolute radiocarbon dating, osteological and stable isotope analyses of the human remains, and the revision of the available contextual information. We recovered the remains of seven individuals with poor preservation and accelerated degradation from the Late Antique necropolis. These individuals were identified here as possible members of the social elite due to their archaeological context, becoming the first-time human remains relative to this social status within this chronology have been detected in NW Iberian Peninsula. The isotopic data obtained is broadly compared with contemporaneous sites along the Iberian Peninsula and the Balearic Islands for a complete interpretation. Additionally, we generate a simple routed and concentration-dependent Bayesian model to predict the source of dietary carbon in consumers, from which we calculate the marine radiocarbon reservoir effect. Despite the low number of individuals analysed, we argue that our results are of great archaeological significance as this represents the first biomolecular approach to the Late Antique (5th–8th centuries CE) social elite individuals from the northwestern and probably the whole Iberian Peninsula.

Keywords

• stable isotopes
• Gallaecia
• osteology
• early middle ages
• social elite