and other scientific disciplines more favored by governmental priorities. Foreign collaboration in part mitigates this problem. The whole of Spain has one thermoluminescence and three radiocarbon-dating laboratories, eleven teams working on paleobotany (mainly palynology), seven working on paleontology, and two devoted to archaeometallurgy. The majority of these specialists and specialist laboratories were established in order to serve regional research favored by the ongoing administrative decentralization.

The Future of Spanish Archaeology: The Challenge of Decentralization

Archaeology was an element in all of the nationalist claims to legitimacy made in Spain from 1800 to 1936. As in other European countries, the españolista (“Hispanicizing,” a term used to refer to an identification between what is Spanish and what is Castilian, in the broad sense of claiming a single historical tradition for all the peoples of Spain) oligarchy and the various regional elites (especially in the Basque country and Catalonia) traced their national roots at least to the peoples that resisted the Roman conquest (Ruiz Zapatero 1993a). This archaeologically justified nationalism was reflected in the literature (Olmos 1992a) and in the plastic arts. Modern events presented in ancient guise were combined with direct allusions to events in antiquity so as to glorify either Hispanic or regional individuality.

Archaeological cultures were used quite differently in the construction of each national identity. Thus, the Vascones would have avoided a Roman occupation of the Basque country, creating a clear break between that region and the rest of the peninsula, as it had been completely Romanized (Dupla and Emborujo 1991). This notion could be combined with a claim for the homogeneity and continuity of the Basque people from the Paleolithic period on (Diaz Andreu 1993, 79; Rua 1990, 207–209). For its part, Spanish Hispanicist nationalism appealed to antiquity to reinforce ideas such as independence, liberty, and heroism and to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to promote key concepts such as unity, religion, and monarchy (Quesada 1994, 39), in line with traditionalist historical thinking. This defense of the essential continuity of the Spanish as defined by Catholicism established a trajectory from the late empire to the Catholic kings and the Habsburg empire by way of the Christian “reconquest” of the peninsula from the Arabs by the fifteenth century (Salvatierra 1990, 72–73). Meanwhile, Catalans emphasized their Greek roots, using Ampurias as an emblem (Guitart and Riu 1989, 28).

The governments of the Second Republic (1931–1936) were attuned to decentralizing, federalist political goals and assisted in the institutionalization of nationalist (regionalist) archaeologies, the most successful program being the Catalan Generalitat’s (Dupre and Rafels 1991, 175). The Franco uprising put a violent end to this process, and the regime that emerged from the Civil War was characterized by a centralism and Hispanicism (Diaz Andreu 1993) that disappeared only after the restoration of democracy in 1975. During the 1940s and 1950s, all the nineteenth-century historical clichés were revived, illustrated, and incorporated in the textbooks (Prieto 1979; Valls 1993), and all other nationalist (regionalist) manipulations of the archaeological record were prohibited. In the years of nationalist Hispanicist self-assertion, the Iberian Iron Age was repeatedly interpreted as a precedent for leadership by a caudillo and as the origin of essential Spanish traits that were still part of the folklore and supposed national character (Olmos 1992b, 10–12). This ideological policy was most important in the years immediately after World War II when the Franco regime was internationally isolated and striving for self-sufficiency. In the later Franco years, Spanish archaeology gave greater emphasis to technical issues.

The present regionalization of archaeology has not led to a direct return to the process of inventing regionalist traditions interrupted by the Civil War. Other factors are more important, although the lack of specific studies on the most recent period could occasionally leave any interpretation open to question. On the one hand, interest in the social history of Spanish archaeology is still in its infancy and mostly oriented toward the early periods of the discipline’s