El Turuñuelo: orientalising barrow
A barrow of the orientalising period in the Guadiana floodplain, south-west of Mérida, cut through by an irrigation canal of the Badajoz Plan. The municipal catalogue suggests it may correspond to a building of the «Cancho Roano» type — that is, to one of those great Tartessian adobe complexes (sanctuary, palace or singular building) which, on falling into ruin and being deliberately buried, left an artificial mound on the flat.
- Type
- Túmulo orientalizante
- Preservation
- Surface finds
- Protection
- Inventoried · Nivel B-6
- Coordinates
- 38.87904, -6.46844
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
That family of sites is the one that has transformed what is known of the middle Guadiana in the Early Iron Age over recent decades, with Cancho Roano (Zalamea de la Serena) and the Turuñuelo of Guareña as the reference points. The place name «turuñuelo», which means precisely a hillock or mound, recurs across the district and often marks structures of this kind.
It should not be confused with the Casas del Turuñuelo at Guareña, a different and far better-known site some 35 km to the east. This one, in the municipality of Mérida, has not been excavated: it is known from survey and from the work of J. Jiménez and C. Domínguez, and the synthesis by Navascués and Jiménez on the lands of Mérida before the Romans (1989). What can be seen is the mound itself, sectioned by the canal, and material on the surface. Its character is therefore a reasonable hypothesis awaiting excavation. Location approximate, converted from the UTM coordinates in the municipal catalogue.
What each period left here
It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.
0 facts
0 photographs
Iron Age
This site has fabric from this period. Mérida has 1 more sites built in the same layer.
See the whole layer →Below the deepest layer of each site is the ground itself: what has not been excavated yet, or what left nothing built. The catalogue only claims what is documented.
A short walk from here
Straight-line distances, worked out from the coordinates of each site.