Papers by Juan J . R . Villarias-Robles
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Nov 30, 1998
Los autores ofrecen una nueva transcripción de dos interrogatorios judiciales relacionados con Po... more Los autores ofrecen una nueva transcripción de dos interrogatorios judiciales relacionados con Polo de Ondegardo (ca. 1520-1575) y la situación en el valle de Cochabamba (Bolivia) en el siglo XVI. Los dos documentos ayudan a entender el concepto que tenía Polo de Ondegardo sobre los mitimaes en el imperio inca. También ilustran sobre el importante papel económico que podía llegar a tener esta categoría social en el orden incaico. Los mitimaes no perdían por ello necesariamente la vinculación con sus grupos étnicos de origen, contrariamente a la idea más extendida sobre los llamados “mitimaes del Inca” que se encuentra en la bibliografía.
Revista De Dialectologia Y Tradiciones Populares, Jun 30, 2010
Geomorphology, Jul 1, 2023
Revista De Dialectologia Y Tradiciones Populares, Jun 30, 2016
U. S. anthropologist Terence S. Turner died in November, 2015, after a long and intense life devo... more U. S. anthropologist Terence S. Turner died in November, 2015, after a long and intense life devoted to studying the indigenous peoples of Brazil and Amazonia, especially the Kayapo. He was as keen to reconstruct their culture prior to contact with the Portuguese and later Brazilian frontier, as he was to monitor the transformation process that such contact stimulated. In the early 2000s, he was actively involved in the controversy triggered by Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon , which dealt with the negative impact on the Yanomami of certain forms of scientific research conducted in the West.
Revista De Dialectologia Y Tradiciones Populares, Jun 25, 2008
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2018
Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 1999
Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 1999
The Influence of Hellenic Philosophy on the Contemporary World, 2019
Results in the recent studies of the geomorphological evolution of the coastlines of Iberia in th... more Results in the recent studies of the geomorphological evolution of the coastlines of Iberia in the Gulf of Cadiz in the Middle and Late Holocene add up to archaeological evidence accumulated since the 1980s in support of a renewed case for the representation of the pre-Roman kingdom of Tartessus in the writings of a number of Greek and Roman authors of Antiquity. Herodotus, for instance, made reference to this Iberian kingdom in connection with Ionian navigation, trade, and settlement in the western Mediterranean Sea in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. The accumulated evidence ought to make researchers revise the paradigm for studying Tartessus that has prevailed in the literature since the 1960s. Launched in the wake of a number of sustained archaeological excavations and spectacular finds in the Spanish regions of Andalusia and Estremadura in the late 1950s and early 1960s, this paradigm has two defining characteristics: (1) the resort to archaeology as the practically exclusive source for Tartessus, to the detriment of the narratives from Antiquity, and (2) the concept of this ancient kingdom as a derivative culture in the long history of relations that natives of southern Iberia maintained with Phoenician traders and colonists.
Anuario de Estudios Americanos, 1998
This paper is an edited version of that presented in the international Conference Ancient Greece ... more This paper is an edited version of that presented in the international Conference Ancient Greece and Contemporary World: The Influence of Greek Thought on Philosophy, Science and Technology (Ancient Olympia, Greece, 28- 31 August 2016), published under the reference ‘“The Representation of the Kingdom of Tartessus by the Ancient Greeks Revisited: New Evidence for a Forgotten Cause’, by Juan J. R. Villarias-Robles & Antonio Rodriguez-Ramirez. In S. A. Paipetis (ed.), 2017, Ancient Greece and Contemporary World: The Influence of Greek Thought on Philosophy, Science and Technology. An International Conference (Ancient Olympia, 28-31 August 2016) (ISBN: 978-960-530-171-2), pp. 133-141. Athens: University of Patras & International Center for Sciences and Hellenic Values
The Influence of Hellenic Philosophy on the Contemporary World, edited by J. G. Dellis & S. Paipetis , 2019
A remarkable feature of the geomorphological processes at work on the coasts of the Gulf of Cadiz... more A remarkable feature of the geomorphological processes at work on the coasts of the Gulf of Cadiz in SW Iberia is the estuarine mouths of a number of large-flowing rivers: Guadiana, Piedras, Tinto-Odiel, Guadalete and Guadalquivir. These mouths exhibit sandy barriers and marshlands. Over the most recent millennia these five estuaries have been conditioned by fluvial-marine dynamics, climate change, neo-tectonics and anthropogenic activity. The systems of sandy littoral barriers and marshlands built up during phases of progradation and aggradation, which were interrupted at intervals in the course of the Holocene by erosional phases of “Extreme wave events” or EWEs (storm surges or tsunamis) and subsidence. A multidisciplinary study from a number of cores drilled in the Guadalquivir paleo-estuary has made it possible to identify evidence of as many as three EWEs in the area in the 2nd millennium BCE: A (~2000 cal yr BCE), B (~1550 cal yr BCE) and C (~1150 cal yr BCE). Evidence of these three events has been recognized elsewhere along the Iberian coasts of the Gulf. The three events caused significant geographical changes, which may have affected human settlements established in the area during the Neolithic and Copper Age periods, as well as during the subsequent Middle Bronze Age. They may have affected, for instance, the site where the city of Cadiz now stands. In the Middle Bronze Age, which EWE C probably terminated, the present-day peninsula of Cadiz was divided into at least three islands, one of them being “Erýtheia,” mentioned by Greek geographer and ethnologist Strabo of Amasia around AD 1 in connection with the legend of Geryon or Geryones, king of Tartessus. This legend is intertwined with that of Bronze Age Greek hero Heracles. A large temple dedicated to this character (the Herákleion) on one of the islands, arguably Erýtheia, made Cadiz famous in Antiquity. Strabo also mentions a settlement by the name of “Port of Menestheus” as well as an oracle by the name of “Oracle of Menestheus” upon the shores of the Gulf of Cadiz. In all likelihood, this “Menestheus” was the same as the Athenian leader Menestheus who fought in the Trojan War, according to Homer in The Iliad.
The Spanish Coastal Systems, 2019
The estuary of the Guadalquivir River is the largest in the Gulf of Cadiz, covering an area of so... more The estuary of the Guadalquivir River is the largest in the Gulf of Cadiz, covering an area of some 185,000 ha. From a geological standpoint, the estuary represents the culmination of the marine filling of the Cenozoic Guadalquivir Basin. The present-day configuration of the estuary is the result of the post-glacial transgression of the Atlantic Ocean, starting ca. 15,000 years, that developed during the latest Pleistocene-Holocene up until some 5,500 years ago, when the level of the sea stabilised. The lower Guadalquivir valley was transformed into a wide estuary as the interfluves turned into pronounced headlands. Marine and fluvial dynamics, dependent upon climate and tectonics, thus shaped the present landscape, which features extensive dune systems, marshes and spits, as well as erosion of the headlands (cliff formation).
Extreme-Wave Events in the Guadalquivir Estuary in the Late Holocene: Paleogeographical and cultural implications, 2022
Research in the Guadalquivir estuary and its environs has revealed evidence of a periodic success... more Research in the Guadalquivir estuary and its environs has revealed evidence of a periodic succession of extreme-wave events in the area from the third millennium BC to the third century AD. Return periods range from 400 to 800 years. Some of these extreme-wave events may have had a magnitude comparable with that of the so-called "Lisbon earthquake" of 1755. Contrary to the tenets of the uniformitarian paradigm in geologystill influential in the archeological literature-these events had short-, mid-, and long-term geomorphological and paleo-environmental, as well as immediately destructive and demographic, effects. Attention ought to be called to reverberations of these events in the cultural development of southwestern Iberia as well, which is independently known for puzzling interruptions, recommencements, and transformations every few centuries from the Neolithic to the Roman period. The two records, natural and cultural, might be connected. In study areas with a compelling historical and archeological heritage, such as western Andalusia, there is need for multidisciplinary projects that, by bringing geology and biology to bear on archeology and history, aim to accurately establish the succession of geographical and environmental transformations, the impact of these transformations on the area's cultural history, and the chronology of the events.
The author critically assesses the economist Alfons Barcelo’s interesting theory regarding the dy... more The author critically assesses the economist Alfons Barcelo’s interesting theory regarding the dynamics of economic and social reproduction; he notices in this theory, in particular, a concept of the economic as a self-regulating sphere in the reproduction of a society, as well as a concept of surplus as something absolute, measureable beyond the satisfaction of material needs that are considered universal. By contrast, the author proposes, by pointing to a number of historical and anthropological cases, that the economic has never been, nor is, a self-sustaining realm of the social, not even under capitalism, and that surplus and satisfaction of needs ought to be rather understood as variables that are always relative to the cultural and historical conditions of reproduction—a process in which not only people directly engaged in material production but also society as a whole participate. Consequently, explaining profound changes in history such as the emergence of social classes and formation of the state should not be made dependent upon the previous production of surplus on which to uphold such changes and their effects; instead, surplus would have existed previously, the significant novelty lying in the mode of appropriation and use of it by all members of the community and in the repercussions of this novelty in the structure of production and reproduction. SPANISH: El autor valora críticamente la interesante teoría del economista Alfons Barceló (1976 y 1980) sobre las dinámicas de la reproducción económica y social; en concreto, lee en ella un concepto de lo económico en una sociedad como un ámbito autónomo en el proceso de reproducción de la misma y un concepto del excedente como algo absoluto, medible a partir de la satisfacción de unas necesidades materiales básicas que se consideran universales. Propone plantear, por el contrario —señalando a casos históricos y antropológicos— que lo económico nunca ha sido ni es un ámbito autónomo, ni siquiera bajo el capitalismo, y que el excedente y la satisfacción de necesidades debieran entenderse mejor como variables siempre relativas a las condiciones históricas y culturales en que se diese la reproducción; condiciones que, además, afectan siempre no sólo a las personas que intervienen directamente en el proceso de producción material sino también a la sociedad en su conjunto. En consecuencia, la explicación de cambios profundos en la historia como el surgimiento de las clases sociales y la formación del Estado no debería hacer suponer que la sociedad en que hubieran acaecido hubiera creado antes un excedente económico con el que mantener esos cambios y sus efectos. El excedente ya habría existido; lo que hubiera variado es el modo de apropiación y de uso del mismo por todos los miembros de una comunidad y las repercusiones que esta novedad hubiera tenido en la estructura de la producción y la reproducción.
Uploads
Papers by Juan J . R . Villarias-Robles