Ancient chariot emerges among remains of mysterious society that burned down its own buildings and then disappeared

Archaeologists in Spain have discovered the remains of a 2,400-year-old bronze chariot that was used to honor the gods and may have had links to the ancient Etruscans, who lived in what is now Italy. ‪The discovery is "without known parallels" in Iberia, according to the research team.

The roughly 24-inch-long (60 centimeters) chariot was designed with a flat, table-like top that people would have used as a surface for burning incense as a divine offering, according to a translated statement.

The side of the chariot showcases a face sticking out its tongue. This face appears to be an unusual fusion of a gorgon, an ancient protective symbol associated with Medusa; and Achelous, a powerful river god in Greek mythology who could turn into a bull, Guiomar Pulido González, an archaeologist at the Mérida Institute of Archaeology (part of the Spanish National Research Council) who was involved with the discovery, told Live Science.

Archaeologists unearthed part of the chariot, including two legs and two wheels, at an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo (Spanish for "Houses of Turuñuelo") in Spain's Badajoz province, close to the border with Portugal. The two legs look like two people holding up the table part of the chariot.

Both of the short sides of the chariot feature a mythical creature associated with safeguarding: a lion with wings and an eagle head, called a griffin. "All the figurative parts of the chariots point to protective divinities," Pulido explained, though "we are not sure what they are protecting ‪—‬ maybe the content of the chariot, or the viewers looking at them."

Archaeologists have previously discovered similar chariots made by the Etruscans, a pre-Roman people who lived in Italy from about 900 to 100 B.C. However, the newfound one is the first known chariot to feature a gorgon-Achelous face mashup, and the first of its kind to be found in the Iberian Peninsula, according to Pulido, who is also a doctoral student at the Autonomous University of Madrid studying ancient Mediterranean imports throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

Restorers working on the artifact noticed that the two people holding the chariot are wearing skirts, which would be unusual for an Etruscan chariot; typically, Etruscan-crafted bronze figures are naked, Pulido said. Despite this anomaly, the theory is that the chariot was made by the Etruscans and arrived in modern-day Spain via trade routes.

The chariot was found in a layer suggesting it was discarded around the end of the fifth century B.C., though the design of the gorgon-Achelou face's iconography indicates that it could have been made as early as the sixth century B.C.

An enigmatic people

The archaeological site that yielded the bronze chariot is in an area known as the Middle Guadiana River Valley, which has 14 known sites left behind by an enigmatic people that completely disappeared from the archaeological record around 400 B.C., Pulido noted. They were probably local populations that were heavily influenced by or mixed with the Tartessians, a civilization that settled in the Iberian Peninsula around the eighth century B.C. and was known for its elaborate writing system.

Each of the 14 sites holds the remains of burnt buildings that were subsequently filled in with soil and fragmented objects, Pulido said. The recently discovered chariot had been intentionally broken — it has no other damage besides being halved — and included in the debris.

(Image credit: Construyendo Tarteso Project )

Excavators found the chariot at an archaeological site called Casas del Turuñuelo (Spanish for "Houses of Turuñuelo") in southwestern Spain.

(Image credit: Construyendo Tarteso Project)

Researchers think that the chariot was made by the Estruscans, a pre-Roman civilization from what is now Italy, and that it ended up in Spain through trade.

The current leading theory regarding these ruins is that, for some unknown reason and around the same time, the inhabitants of these centers burned down their buildings, filled them in and then abandoned the sites. The burning and filling seem to have been too intentional for it to have happened in the context of an enemy attack, according to Pulido. "Instead, they may have formed part of a carefully planned ritual of closure, a symbolic farewell to buildings that were intentionally decommissioned," she said.

Then, this culture "disappeared from the archaeological record," Pulido said. But other evidence, including imported pottery from Greece and other Etruscan bronze objects, suggests that whoever these people were, they participated in the ancient trade networks stretching across the Mediterranean, with their elite having enough wealth to afford imported objects, she said.

See if you know what these mysterious artifacts are with our archaeological fragments quiz!