The Hillfort

Croa de Posmarcos stands on a flattened elevation of the Barbanza, that small mountain massif plunging into the sea between the rías of Arousa and of Muros and Noia. The hillfort was acquired by the A Pobra do Caramiñal town council in 2024. From up here, overlooking the valley of the San Isidro parish, its ancient inhabitants had everything that mattered to them spread out before their eyes: the paths leading down to the ría, the farmlands, the open Atlantic horizon and, in the distance, the other hillforts that made up their Iron Age neighbourhood. Because a hillfort is never understood in isolation. It is a piece of a network, a node in a humanised landscape that had been occupied and transformed for centuries.

The place we now call Croa de Posmarcos is one of those sites where the earth remembers. It remembers the stones someone carefully placed, one atop another, to raise a rampart. It remembers the hearths where food was cooked, the pots that broke and stayed buried, the everyday waste transformed, over time, into archaeological information.

One of the first things the 2025 work confirmed was the existence of the rampart. It was no unexpected finding —the topography already hinted at it—, but confirming its structure yielded a wealth of information. In the southwestern sector of the site, a stretch of parapet appeared: 2.5 metres wide and about 50 centimetres of preserved height, running from southwest to northeast and tracing a slight curve in that area.

The way it is built is typical of the Gallaecian hillforts: two external stone facings —granite ashlars laid dry— and, between them, a core of heavily compacted clayey earth mixed with rubble and river pebbles brought up from the nearby river Lérez.

Higher up, in a terraced area on the northern part of the plot, one of the most eloquent images of everyday life at the hillfort came to light: the remains of a hearth. It is a circular structure built with large schist stones that are clearly affected by fire —they still preserve the reddish tone of thermal alteration—, and at its centre fragments of rubefied daub were found, that is, fired clay which probably formed the base or lining of the combustion structure. It is barely 1.30 by 1 metre, but that is enough to imagine what took place there: someone kindling the fire, cooking, warming themselves in the cold Barbanza nights two thousand years ago.

The hearth is associated with a dark layer full of charcoal and fragmented building material, all of it resting on a floor of yellow xabre altered by the heat. Archaeology does not always uncover grand monuments. Sometimes the most moving thing is precisely the humblest: an invisible hand stirring the embers.

Although no complete remains of dwellings were identified in 2025, there is evidence of their existence: the daub. These are fragments of fired clay which in some cases preserve the imprints of the vegetal framework to which they were attached —the marks of rods, ties and timber. It is the direct testimony of the traditional building techniques of the Castro culture: timber and vegetal frames coated with those clay pastes which, once dried, created an insulating, sturdy and repairable wall.

Two different types of paste were documented: one coarser and poorly fired, and another better made, with fine mineral tempers. The latter concentrates near the hearth, which suggests that a specific preparation was used for elements that would be exposed to heat. They were, in short, people who knew what they were doing.