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{{ANEAutoria|Autores= María Sánchez Agustí, José Antonio Álvarez Castrillón, Mercedes de la Calle Carracedo, Daniel Galván Desvaux, Joaquín García Andrés, Isidoro González Gallego, Montserrat León Guerrero, Esther López Torres, Carlos Lozano Ruiz, Ignacio Martín Jiménez, Rosendo Martínez Rodríguez, Rafael de Miguel González}}
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|epigrafe=Experimentation with metallurgy: the Bronze Age}}
[[File:Enelaboracion.jpg|left|thumb|none|200px|Image:The Bull from Costix. Museo arqueológico Nacional, Madrid
<span style="color: #b20027; ">xxx [PDF]. [Datos]. </span>]]
In the Second Millennium BC, population growth created a greater demand for raw materials and subsistence products, causing agricultural and livestock farming (and its by-products) to become more widespread. This still Neolithic society had already mastered metallurgical techniques and had discovered bronze, a strong alloy of copper and tin. Bronze arrived on the Peninsula through the Pyrenees in the Third Millennium BC and was used along with copper to make tools and objects, according to stratigraphic studies of the Bauma del Serrat del Pont site (Girona).
Trade increased during the Early Bronze Age and there are strong indications that society was becoming increasingly socially stratified. This was evidenced by the discovery of burial sites for single individuals (mainly in burial pits and megalithic cists) as well as by differences in the quality and quantity of funerary objects placed in these sites. The Argar culture, which succeeded the bell-shaped ceramic, and produced a wide range of ceramic objects, was no longer the only flourishing culture on the Peninsula, according to research carried out in the last 50 years. The Bronze Age map shows the emergence of a diversity of cultures chronologically beginning with the Protocogota settlements on the Nothern Plateau around 2000 BC.
The late Bronze Age began around the 11th century BC with three different cultural currents predominating: Central European, Atlantic, and Eastern Mediterranean. With an increase in cultural exchanges, these civilisations mixed with native cultures, eventually evolving into what are known as Pre-Roman cultures. Major changes took place and new traditions arose. In the Northwest, they began to cremate their dead and leave their ashes in urnfields, while in the middle of the Peninsula and in the northern and western regions, highly sophisticated bronze weapons and objects were commercially traded. And lastly, merchants and new cultural groups arose in the Mediterranean and southern regions of the Peninsula, foreshadowing the future colonisation of these areas. Meanwhile, advances in metallurgy led to the development of goldsmithing, as evidenced by the Treasure of Villena (Alicante). Livestock routes stretching inland were also built, as revealed at some excavation sites such as Peña Negra in Crevillent (Alicante). These external influences did not, however, impede indigenous development. Examples of this can be seen from the Cogotas culture, which extended to the Douro and Tagus river basins starting in the 11th century BC, as well as from the Talayotic culture on the Balearic Islands at the end of the Naviform period.
During this period emerge control walkway in livestock routes, water points, mountain passes or river fords as the Tagus River Trail. Metallurgical production sites were built to the north of the Tagus River in Portugal and along the Tinto-Odiel estuary, home to the Tartessian Civilisation during the 10th and 11th centuries BC. By the 8th century BC The Atlantic metallurgy was predominant on the entire Iberian Peninsula, especially at settlements in fertile and grassy areas along the river plains. Such settlements were frequently left open and unprotected, but at other times, built inside walled enclosures. Phoenician merchants began to appear on the coasts around this precolonial period, and later, towards the end of the 7th century BC, the Greeks.
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