Excavación arqueológica y prospección geomagnética en el sector norte del yacimiento de la Edad del Cobre de Valencina de la Concepción (Sevilla). Campaña de 2017

In 2017, excavations of the Valencina Nord Project began in the northern sector of this large mega-site of ca. 200 ha during the Middle Chalcolithic. In the first campaign, geophysical survey at the NW sector, in direction of the Los Pozos ravine was prioritized, and it is possible to propose that three of the ditch systems identified in 2014 continue westward, the outermost with the ditches 5, 14, 6 and 7, a second system with ditches 11 and 12, and the third, which cuts these last two ditches, with a single ditch 10 of larger dimensions. On the other hand, it was documented that the settlement continues outside the outermost ditch 5 in sector 4 at Cerro del Marmol, and ascends northwards towards Cerro de la Cabeza in sector 5. The excavation focused on an area with multiple pit structures excavated in the ground according to geophysics, while grid 4 included part of the great ditch 10. The structures that have begun to be excavated in grid 3 and 4 show a good correlation with the geophysical data. A novel aspect is the identification of a first fragment of Bell Beaker pottery in the excavation of Cerro de la Cabeza and several Early Bronze Age ceramics that extend the Middle Chalcolithic phase detected in survey during 2014, supported by two radiocarbon dates in our excavations. These data suggest that the settlement, which probably reduced its dimensions during the Late Chalcolithic, had a minimum extension of 27 ha, and presents the largest Bell Beaker pottery set in the Iberian Peninsula, tripling in number of fragments to Zambujal.