Iberian death rites and the vulture hypothesis for missing Lusitanian burials

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Key facts

• Roman and Greek literary sources describe Iberian fighters as proud of being eaten by vultures; a joke in a Greek comic distinguishes a 'Hyrcanian funeral' (eaten by dogs) from an 'Iberian one' (eaten by vultures), and Roman writers mention cremation being regarded as effeminate and reserved for the sick and weak.
• Drawings and carvings made across the peninsula, in regions inhabited by many different cultures, portray dead bodies being consumed by vultures.
• Between about 1200 BC, with the arrival of the Celts, and about 500 BC, urns and cremated remains spread widely, often alongside inhumation in elite burials with grave goods and offerings.
• Earlier, the dominant practice was collective ossuaries and excarnation, peaking in the Neolithic and megalithic periods with dolmens from about 4000-5000 BC; France and England show the same excarnation-to-inhumation-to-cremation sequence, but later.
• The Iberian case is unusual because the transition never completed, with several burial rituals practised at the same time and in the same place.
• The video notes that the core area attributed to the Lusitanians, the interior of Portugal between the Douro and Tagus, has yielded no houses, walls, temples, cemeteries, tombs or urns for roughly 2,000 years, from the late Chalcolithic in the early 300s BC to the first Roman settlers.
• The eight Lusitanian cities mentioned in the 'Wars of Lusitania' have never been located and no building of that era has been identified.
• The video proposes as a hypothesis that the absence of Lusitanian bodies could be explained by exposing the dead to scavengers and that the Bad Neighbour platforms were a localised funerary variation, but judges it unlikely because the platforms are too large for a single body and no comparable structures exist elsewhere in Iberia.
• Celts related to the Gauls and Britons entered the peninsula around 1200 BC with their own language and cremation customs, encountering pre-Indo-European-speaking Iberos; the Romans later applied the umbrella term Celtiberians to this mixed population.

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