The Anxiety of Cabotage and Trade

As megalithic construction moved east from the coastal estuaries and the Guadalquivir basin, it encountered a geographic bottleneck. The Sub-Baetic depression at Antequera forms a natural inland crossroads. It connects the fertile plains of the Guadalquivir to the Mediterranean coast and the rugged mountainous interior. For communities navigating the escalating pressures of the Holocene Arid Climax, controlling this transit hub became a strategic necessity.

The Inland Crossroads: Antequera

The architecture at Antequera maps a definitive escalation in territorial anxiety over a thousand years, captured in three separate monuments, Menga, Romeral and Viera.

Dolmen de Menga: The Terrestrial Anchor

During the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Sub-Baetic depression was warm, moist, and forested with oak and pine. By 3800 BCE, this optimal climate was ending. An era of progressive aridification set in across the Iberian Peninsula [Carrión et al., 2010].

The landscape was degrading. Forests thinned, replaced by expanding Mediterranean scrubland and dry steppe. As the wider plains desiccated, the Guadalhorce river, which cuts through the Antequera depression, became a lifeline supporting a shrinking corridor of gallery forests. The local clans were not building Menga for no reason; they were engineering a territorial anchor at a time when arable land and reliable water were becoming contested resources.

Built between 3800 and 3600 BCE, the Dolmen de Menga is a massive engineering achievement. It is a gallery grave stretching 27.5 metres, culminating in a capstone estimated to weigh 180 tons. The logistics required to construct Menga demanded an unprecedented centralisation of labour [García Sanjuán et al., 2014].

Apart from its size, Menga’s primary difference lies in its orientation. Standard Iberian megaliths align with the eastern horizon to capture the sunrise. Menga breaks this rule. It points northeast, aligning with the Peña de los Enamorados, a mountain with a distinct human profile [Hoskin, 2001].

This deviation is a deliberate territorial statement. The builders ignored celestial alignment to tie their lineage permanently to an unmistakeable geological landmark. In a landscape defined by shifting populations and the anxiety of exchange, Menga served as a terrestrial anchor. The local clan embedded their right to the crossroads into the mountain itself.

Tholos de El Romeral: The Elite Shift

Constructed between 3000 and 2800 BCE, the Tholos de El Romeral sits four kilometres from Menga and Viera. Romeral abandons the orthostatic gallery design. It is a chambered cairn featuring a long corridor of drystone walls culminating in two consecutive false domes.

Like Menga, Romeral ignores the sunrise, aligning instead with the Camorro de las Siete Mesas in the El Torcal mountain range. However, Romeral reflects a fundamental shift in social structure. Like the tholoi at Valencina, it marks the arrival of a wealth-hoarding Copper Age elite.

The architecture shifts away from the open, communal defiance of Menga into restricted ritual spaces. The chambers of Romeral are tight and segmented, designed to restrict access. It represents a society where territorial anxiety had mutated. Anchoring the clan to the landscape was no longer sufficient; the new hierarchy required enclosed spaces to hoard prestige and conduct esoteric rituals away from the collective. The open territorial claims of the early farmers had ended. The era of the locked-down elite had begun.

Dolmen de Viera: The Celestial Control Group

Almost as soon as Romeral was finished, around 2800 BCE, the Dolmen de Viera was constructed just 70 metres from Menga. Viera is a standard passage grave, extending 21 metres and terminating in a small, square burial chamber.

Unlike Menga and Romeral, Viera follows orthodox megalithic tradition. It faces east at an azimuth of 96 degrees, aligning with the morning sun during the spring and autumn equinoxes [Hoskin, 2001].

Viera proves that Menga’s terrestrial alignment was not a forgotten tradition. The Antequera communities still understood celestial alignments. Viera demonstrates a society hedging its bets. Even as local elites made idiosyncratic claims on the immediate geology, they maintained the ancient, celestial traditions of the wider Neolithic world.

The Empty Anchor and the Arriving Wealth

To understand this location's significance, we must look at the environment and geography of the mid-Holocene and the material evidence recovered from the transit routes.

Barely 200 metres from Menga sits Cerro de Marimacho, a Chalcolithic open-air agricultural village [García Sanjuán et al., 2014]. This was not a market town, and the dolmens were not meant to act as signposts or identifiers of such a place. The local clans were farmers.

They were farming in a valley that served as a geographic bottleneck. Anyone moving herds or goods between the coast and the interior had to pass through this depression. By building Menga, the farmers at Marimacho were claiming ownership of the land itself. They reasoned, correctly, that by holding the valley, they controlled the transit route.

Over the next millennium, the products travelling along the transit route changed. By 3000 BCE, the corridor flooded with the prestige economy of the Copper Age.

Because Menga and Viera were plundered in antiquity, they lack primary grave goods. The evidence for this influx of wealth is found in the later, restricted tombs of the Copper Age elite. Excavations at the Tholos de El Romeral, alongside the nearby Chalcolithic necropolises of Alcaide and Las Aguilillas, reveal a steady flow of materials that do not naturally exist in the Antequera depression [Aranda Jiménez et al., 2020].

The later elites hoarded marine shells harvested from the Mediterranean coast. They acquired tabular flint from the high sierras of Granada and amassed prestige items crafted from Sicilian amber and African ivory [Murillo-Barroso et al., 2018].

These goods did not arrive via merchant caravans. They moved through down-the-line exchange, passed hand-to-hand between clans to seal marriage alliances, resolve disputes, or secure grazing rights [Chapman, 2003]. The medium of exchange was social debt backed by geographic access. Coastal herdsmen gifted these rare items to the Antequera elites to secure safe passage through the chokepoint and access to inland pastures.

The original builders of Menga claimed a shrinking green corridor to ensure their survival. A thousand years later, the builders of Romeral used that exact chokepoint to intercept and hoard the wealth of a peninsula-spanning trade network.

The Ditched Enclosure of Marroquíes Bajos

Moving east from Antequera into the upper Guadalquivir basin, the landscape dictated a different defensive strategy. As agricultural populations swelled beyond the carrying capacity of the open plains, society physically enclosed itself.

Located in the modern city of Jaén, Marroquíes Bajos was a Copper Age macro-village covering 113 hectares. Occupied intensely between 2500 and 2000 BCE, the site is defined by five concentric ditches and earthworks [Zafra et al., 1999].

This site represents the anxiety of mass population and water management. Unlike contemporary communities in the rocky southeast who built defensive stone walls at Los Millares, the inhabitants of the clay-rich Guadalquivir basin dug immense moats. These ditches served a dual purpose. They captured and managed scarce water resources during the arid climax, and they provided a physical defence against competing groups [Díaz-Zorita Bonilla et al., 2018]. Marroquíes Bajos illustrates how the "Architecture of Anxiety" adapted to local geology, serving as the hydraulic equivalent of the militarised stone forts to the east.

The Generational Grind: The Necropolis of Panoría

Further east, approaching the badlands of the Granada Geopark, the Darro river valley hosts the Necropolis of Panoría.

Panoría consists of polygonal megalithic tombs that stand out not for their monumental scale, but for their longevity. Radiocarbon dating proves these specific tombs were used continuously for over a thousand years, from roughly 3500 to 2000 BCE [Aranda Jiménez et al., 2020].

Panoría illustrates the generational grind of territorial anxiety. Claiming and holding land was not a single declarative event. It required an active, multi-generational physical presence in the soil. As the climate worsened, local clans returned to the same tombs century after century. They continually added and removed bodies, using fresh burials to re-stamp their deed to the territory against rival groups.

Gorafe and Oasis Siege Anxiety

Moving east from the Darro valley, the landscape deteriorates into the badlands of the Guadix-Baza basin in modern Granada province. Here, the Gor River cuts a deep gorge through an arid environment. It hosts the Gorafe complex, comprising over 240 dolmens. As the Holocene Arid Climax accelerated, local agro-pastoralists were forced to abandon the drying plains and concentrate in the Gor canyon, the only reliable water source in the region.

The psychological policing of this territory began at its borders. At the northern end of the Gor valley, the rocks overlooking the confluence of two valleys are carved with petroglyphs at sites like Cerro de las Minas, featuring bows, axes, and geometric motifs [Cámara Serrano et al., 2010]. Placed at a natural geographical junction, they acted as a warning to outsiders entering the bottleneck, the territory ahead was claimed, and the clans holding it were armed.

Just north of this junction lies the thermal springs of Alicún. Here, continuous mineral-rich warm water flows year-round, creating an oasis so heavily utilised that over millennia, mineral deposition and human management built a massive, raised travertine aqueduct known as the Acequia del Toril [García-García et al., 2020]. The local clans responded with rigid territoriality, constructing the Dolmenes de Alicún alongside the warm water channels to enforce their ownership of the spring.

Moving south into the main Gor canyon, archaeologists have identified roughly eleven separate settlements crammed into a 10-kilometre stretch of the valley bottom [Afonso Marrero, 1993]. Each settlement was strategically situated on a raised natural mound, featuring defensive wooden stockades surrounding clusters of round, wattle-and-daub huts.

The megaliths above them functioned as property deeds. Along the high, flat rim of the valley, the dolmens tend to be small stone cists. The larger, more elaborate passage graves were constructed on the terraced sides of the valley, formed by prehistoric landslips [Esquivel et al., 2012]. These larger dolmens were deliberately positioned on these stepped terraces to directly overlook the specific stockaded settlements below.

The material culture recovered from these tombs reveals a shared ideology of protection and status. Excavations across the necropolis have yielded characteristic slate and schist plaque idols, engraved, geometric representations of ancestral eyes and bodies that mirror those found across southern Iberia from the Alentejo to the southeast [Bueno Ramírez et al., 2019]. The ideological weight embedded in these stones is demonstrated by artifacts such as the rare, decorated anthropomorphic stela recovered from the valley and now preserved in the Centro de Interpretación del Megalitismo in Gorafe. This carved slab was deliberately reused as a structural element within one of the dolmens [Málaga Guerrero, 2004], physically rewriting the ancestral narrative, substituting older symbols of lineage with a permanent architectural claim to the contested soil. The megaliths served as physical markers, warning any rival group moving along the river that the water and the land below were permanently claimed.

The Conservative Periphery: Panoria and Gorafe

The grave goods recovered from both the Necropolis of Panoria and the Gorafe canyons reveal communities that were connected to a regional terrestrial network, but completely excluded from the hyper-exotic, international maritime trade.

At both sites, archaeologists have recovered marine shells (such as Pecten and Dentalium) pierced to form necklaces and bracelets, alongside greenstone (variscite) beads. Because Panoria and Gorafe are located in the arid, high-altitude badlands of the Granada interior, these items prove the communities were not totally isolated. The seashells demonstrate a clear, formalised trade link to the Mediterranean coast, roughly 100 kilometres away. The variscite is even more telling; it was likely mined in the Pico Centeno deposits in Huelva, meaning these inland herders were plugged directly into the broader Iberian drovers' network.

However, the true significance of the grave goods at Panoria and Gorafe lies in what is explicitly missing.

Unlike the sprawling estuarine node of Valencina or the fortified settlement of Los Millares, these inland dolmens contain absolutely zero evidence of international prestige goods. There is no African ivory. There is no Sicilian amber. There are no ostrich eggshells, no rock crystal daggers, and no massive hoards of copper weaponry. The vast majority of the grave goods are overwhelmingly modest and local, flint flakes, simple handmade ceramics, bone tools, and locally sourced polished stone axes.

Within our "Architecture of Anxiety" framework, this material divide perfectly illustrates the social geography of the era. It proves that the hundreds of dolmens in the Gorafe canyon and the Darro river valley were not built by wealthy, highly stratified elites controlling vast trade empires. They were built by conservative, egalitarian pastoralists.

These inland clans were facing the same severe aridification as the coast, but their anxiety was localised. They used the shared Iberian visual shorthand, the megaliths, to anchor their lineages to shrinking pastures and vital water sources. They traded for a few seashells and greenstones to maintain tribal alliances and secure mates, but they either could not access, or deliberately rejected, the extreme wealth and authoritarian social hierarchy that was simultaneously transforming the coastal mega-sites. They were the conservative periphery, clinging to their egalitarian clan structures while the coastal core consumed itself in a race for prestige.

Los Millares: Paranoia, Collapse, and the Precursor to Systems Failure

As the transit routes terminate at the arid southeastern coast of Almería, the "Architecture of Anxiety" reaches its climax. The Los Millares citadel (occupied c. 3200 – 2200 BCE) is the ultimate physical manifestation of paranoia and demographic pressure. Whilst this fortified settlement was contemporaneous with Zambujal in Portugal, its eventual collapse was driven by a radically different catastrophe.

Situated on the sharp point of a commanding ridge, the settlement overlooks the confluence of the Andarax river and a smaller southwestern tributary, the Rambla de Huechar. During the third millennium BCE, the Andarax was a wide, navigable river cutting through a drying landscape. The narrow terraces alongside the river were cultivated by the Millares clan. The river itself was a communications highway, linking Los Milares with the Mediterranean Sea and into North African exchange networks [Molina & Cámara, 2005].

As the wider Almerían hinterland desiccated, this fertile valley became a magnet for displaced populations. The architecture maps this climate-driven migration. Around 3200 BCE, the elites governed from a small, fortified inner citadel (Wall I) at the tip of the promontory. As the population swelled, society was forced to repeatedly expand its defensive footprint. Between roughly 2800 and 2500 BCE, they constructed two additional lines of concentric stone walls (Walls II and III). Finally, around 2500 BCE, the outermost perimeter (Wall IV) was erected, enclosing a six-hectare urban footprint [Molina et al., 2004].

The most revealing aspect of this demographic explosion is where it stopped. Outside Wall IV lay a sprawling, 13-hectare necropolis of over 80 tholos tombs, continuously utilised from 3200 until the site's collapse around 2200 BCE [Aranda Jiménez et al., 2020]. The expanding population pushed right up to the edge of the ancestral burial ground, but the society maintained a strict ideological boundary between the living and the dead. The elites built Wall IV to divide the walled fortress from the city of the ancestors. The dead remained outside the gates.

To defend this swollen population and their monopoly on down-the-line exchange, which included copper metallurgy, imported ceramics, ivory, and North African ostrich eggshells, the fortifications became increasingly formidable [Lull et al., 2014]. The walls were reinforced with bastions, defended barbican gates, and arrow slits. To prevent surprise attacks, they constructed a network of thirteen forward-operating forts on the surrounding hills, ensuring visual control over the valley approaches, particularly the route taken by the copper ore from its source in the Sierra Gador [Molina et al., 2004].

At Los Millares, the egalitarian Neolithic consensus ended. The architectural progression, from the open, communal stone circles of the early farmers to the fortified bastions of the southeast, indicates that society was now defined by hoarding wealth and defending it with organised violence [Chapman, 2003].

The Ideological Divide and the Collapse of Los Millares

The material culture recovered from Los Millares exposes a sharp ideological divide between the coastal fortress and the inland badlands. While the Gorafe canyon represented the easternmost limit of the pan-Iberian slate plaque idols, the elites at Los Millares rejected this inland trend entirely. Their foundational ancestral cult relied on a localised and maritime-influenced vocabulary. They deposited phalange idols carved from animal toe bones, unadorned stone betyls, and high-prestige figurines crafted from imported North African ivory into their tholos tombs. The inland clans clung to a shared Iberian visual shorthand, but Los Millares developed its own distinct ancestral markers.

As systemic stress increased in the settlement’s final centuries, the Los Millares elites adopted a new international networking tool: Maritime Bell Beaker ceramics. Found in the upper levels of the tombs and the later occupation phases of the citadel, these comb-stamped, white-inlaid vessels arrived via the site's extensive Mediterranean trade routes. The adoption of these beakers did not replace their local goods; it supplemented them. It reveals a coastal elite looking outward to the sea, using an international drinking package to forge alliances and secure supply chains just as the broader Copper Age world began to unravel.

Despite its militarisation and international networking, Los Millares could not withstand the ultimate systemic shock: the 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event that turned the already arid southeast into a dust bowl. Around 2200 BCE, despite its once fertile river valley and defensive walls, the citadel was abandoned. The collapse of Los Millares is a micro-scale precursor to the Late Bronze Age systemic collapses seen a millennium later across the eastern Mediterranean [Cline, 2014]. It was driven by a cascading failure: prolonged aridification fractured the interior pastoralist networks, the wider down-the-line exchange of metals and exotica ceased, and the social strain of maintaining a paranoid, fortressed society finally broke the polity from within. High walls could not save a civilisation when the interconnected web of the ancient world unravelled, leaving the valleys empty as the brutal, state-level Argaric culture rose in the mountains to take its place.

Visiting Los Millares

The Los Millares site is open to the public. The original archaeological area is very hard to interpret but there are some excellent diagrams and maps to help. Perhaps the most instructive part is dedicated to a reconstruction of what Los Millares would have looked like in 2800 BCE. Most of the artefacts from Los Millares are displayed at the Archaeological Museum in Almeria city.

Breakdown of Trust: Cabezo del Plomo

Rather than a coordinated Iberian arms race directed by a centralised authority, what we are witnessing during the 3rd millennium BCE is a systemic breakdown of trust. The "Architecture of Anxiety" did not require a sprawling empire to spread, it simply needed the shared, localised threats of climate stress and the disruptive arrival of prestige wealth. To see exactly how this localised paranoia manifested on the ground, we need look no further than the coastal watchtower of Cabezo del Plomo, about 140 kilometres (by sea) north east of the estuary of the Rio Andarax and Los Millares.

Situated on a rugged plateau at the foothills of the Sierra de las Moreras in Mazarrón, Murcia, Cabezo del Plomo occupies a classic ecotone [Muñoz Amilibia, 1983]. But to understand the true strategic power of this site, we must view the landscape through a mid-Holocene lens.

Around 3000 BCE, the Mediterranean was experiencing a climatic highstand. Sea levels were roughly one to two metres higher than they are today. The modern coastal plain that currently separates the archaeological site from the water did not exist; it has been built up over the last five millennia by alluvial runoff and eroded topsoil. During the Copper Age, the sea pushed significantly further inland, forming a deep, sheltered bay that stretched in a sweeping arc from modern Bolnuevo to the promontory above Puerto de Mazarrón [Goy et al., 2003]. The waters of this bay lapped almost directly at the base of the hill. Cabezo del Plomo was not a watchtower observing the coast from a distance; it was a waterfront citadel.

This paleogeography fundamentally upgrades the site's role in the prestige economy. Prehistoric maritime networks relied on cabotage—coastal hopping in small vessels. Crews could perhaps paddle 40 to 50 kilometres a day before needing a calm, protected beach to pull their vessels ashore. The deep Bolnuevo-Mazarrón bay was a welcome sanctuary. By building their fortress directly above this natural harbour, the elites of Cabezo del Plomo were locking down the maritime highway itself. They possessed the physical high ground to either tax, trade with, or raid any coastal traffic moving between the eastern seaboard and the great Andalucian hubs like Los Millares, some three to four days' paddling to the south.

Occupied from roughly 3200 to 2500 BCE, the settlement illustrates the escalating timeline of our anxiety framework. The village covers approximately 3,200 square metres. While the steep natural topography protected the northern and eastern flanks of the hill, the vulnerable western and southern approaches were sealed off by a massive, dry-stone defensive wall [Chapman, 1990].

This wall was reinforced with attached, projecting stone bastions. As any military historian will tell you, a community does not build projecting bastions to corral sheep. Bastions are a deliberate architectural adaptation designed to provide overlapping fields of fire for defenders armed with projectiles. Inside these heavily defended walls, the population lived in tightly packed, circular huts with stone bases and reed roofs, huddled together behind their fortifications.

Excavations conducted by the University of Murcia between 1979 and 1985 revealed an economy caught in the transition from egalitarian farming to defended wealth. The domestic spaces yielded heavy stone grinding tools for processing grain, alongside abundant flint arrowheads and geometric blades used for hunting and defence [Muñoz Amilibia, 1983]. These grave goods demonstrate their connection to the regional exchange routes. The dead were buried with plain ceramics featuring perforated lugs, but they were also adorned with greenstone beads (likely variscite or calaita) and pierced marine shells.

Like the herders at Panoria and Gorafe, the people of Cabezo del Plomo were plugged into the regional prestige network. But unlike the inland herders, these inhabitants had a fixed, coastal surplus and control of a vital maritime chokepoint that they were willing to build a bastion to protect.

The true significance of Cabezo del Plomo within the context of Copper Age Iberia is how it combines the two distinct architectural reflexes of the era. Outside the defensive walls, at the foot of the hill near the ancient waterline, the community constructed a tholos (a false-dome megalithic tomb). Built around the mid-4th millennium BCE, it features a trapezoidal chamber formed by massive orthostats (upright standing stones) and is entirely enclosed within a circular earthen burial mound. Archaeologists have noted that the architecture of the tomb deliberately mimics the circular huts of the living settlement above it, serving as a permanent "second home" for the ancestors [Chapman, 1990].

Cabezo del Plomo encapsulates the dual nature of Copper Age anxiety. The community did not retreat into the high badlands like the Darro valley pastoralists, nor did they achieve the sprawling, terrifying wealth of the Ivory Lady at Valencina. Instead, they built a localised, stronghold. They used the tholos tomb at the base of the hill as a psychological anchor, establishing their ancestral right to the bay. Simultaneously, they built a bastioned fortress at the top of the hill to physically defend the grain, the greenstone, and the maritime routes from their neighbours.

Given the perceived importance of Cabo del Plomo, it is interesting to consider why there is no evidence of the trade in exotica, especially from North Africa, that we see at Los Millares. An explanation may be found by applying the principles of the distance decay model, the principle that the concentration of traded goods drops off the further you move from their source or primary point of entry into a region.

African prestige goods, like ivory and ostrich eggshells, did not cross the open Mediterranean. Instead, they likely entered Iberia through the narrowest chokepoint, the 14-kilometre Strait of Gibraltar. From there, the maritime trade bifurcated. One route moved northwest to Valencina, while the other pushed east to Los Millares. These massive apex hubs acted as economic black holes. They used their vast agricultural surplus and raw copper to absorb the incoming wealth. This created a strict distance-decay effect. By the time coastal traders paddled another 150 kilometres past Cabo de Gata to Cabezo del Plomo, the exotic supply was completely exhausted. The elites built their bastions not to guard international treasures, but to fiercely control the regional wealth that remained.

The Fatal Flaw of the Middleman: The Abandonment of Cabezo del Plomo

To fully dot the I's and cross the T’s on the Iberian coastal narrative, we must look at how Cabezo del Plomo met its end. Its abandonment provides a third model of Copper Age collapse, distinct from both the environmental suffocation of Zambujal and the catastrophic climate shock that broke Los Millares.

Cabezo del Plomo was abandoned significantly earlier than its larger contemporaries, roughly around 2500 BCE. It did not survive to see the 4.2-kiloyear BP aridification event, nor was it conquered by the ensuing Argaric culture. Instead, its demise highlights the inherent fragility of the "Architecture of Anxiety": paranoia is incredibly expensive.

Maintaining a bastioned stone fortress on a steep, rocky plateau requires a continuous influx of surplus wealth. The inhabitants had to be fed, the walls had to be repaired, and the ritual elites had to be subsidised. For centuries, Cabezo del Plomo managed this by acting as a heavily armed gatekeeper, taxing and trading with the coastal cabotage moving through its protected bay. However, acting as a middleman is a dangerous economic game when apex hubs are consolidating power.

As the 3rd millennium BCE progressed, the colossal mega-sites, particularly Los Millares to the south and Valencina to the west, began to monopolise the maritime exchange networks. As these massive demographic black holes exerted greater gravitational pull on the coastal trade, the smaller, regional waystations were bypassed or economically squeezed out. Without the constant wealth generated from the prestige trade moving through their bay, the elites at Cabezo del Plomo lost their economic lifeblood.

The local agricultural yield alone was not enough to sustain a fortressed society. The abandonment of Cabezo del Plomo was not a violent apocalypse; it was an economic deflation. The "Architecture of Anxiety" became unsustainable, and the community quietly dispersed, leaving their bastions and their ancestors behind on the hill.

Mainland Summary

Before we leave the European mainland and move on to the Mediterranean islands it is instructive to reflect on how our ‘Architecture of Anxiety’ framework has evolved. Climatic stress and decreasing areas of agricultural land drove the Neolithic people in Brittany, northern Spain, Portugal, southwestern Iberia and southern Spain to erect psychological barriers, stelae, stone circles and dolmens to identify and protect their land, trading routes and market places. The form and style those barriers took differed depending on geography, geology, population, availability of resources and perceived threats. Towards the end of the megalithic period, psychological barriers proved insufficient against real threats to increasing wealth and riches. The tribes in the Gorafe area constructed wooden stockades whilst those in the Guadalquivir valley, blessed with a deep top and subsoil, dug massive ditched enclosures. At Zambujal (Portugal), Los Millares and Cabezo del Plomo, where the bedrock is rarely below one metre beneath the surface, ditches were not practical. Those tribes built towards the sky and we see the first deliberate, stone fortifications.

References and Further Reading

• Afonso Marrero, J. A. (1993). Poblamiento y Transformaciones Sociales en el Neolítico y Edad del Cobre en la cuenca del río Gor.
• Aranda Jiménez, G., et al. (2020). The chronological and social framework of the Panoría megalithic necropolis. Radiocarbon.
• Aranda Jiménez, G., et al. (2020). Megalithic funerary practices in the Iberian Peninsula.
• Bueno Ramírez, P., et al. (2019). Plaque idols and graphic expression in Iberian megalithism.
• Cámara Serrano, J. A., et al. (2010). Rock art and territoriality in the Gor River Valley.
• Carrión, J. S., et al. (2010). Expected trends and surprises in the Lateglacial and Holocene vegetation history of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology.
• Chapman, R. (1990). Emerging Complexity: The Later Prehistory of South-East Spain, Iberia and the West Mediterranean. Cambridge University Press.
• Chapman, R. (2003). Archaeologies of Complexity. Routledge.
• Cline, E. H. (2014). 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Princeton University Press.
• Díaz-Zorita Bonilla, M., et al. (2018). The Copper Age settlement of Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén, Spain). Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
• Esquivel, J. A., et al. (2012). Geographical Information Systems applied to the spatial analysis of the Gorafe megalithic necropolis. Journal of Archaeological Science.
• García Sanjuán, L., et al. (2014). The Menga Dolmen (Antequera, Spain). Antiquity.
• García-García, F., et al. (2020). Travertine systems and human occupation in the Alicún de las Torres hydrothermal area.
• ·Goy, J. L., Zazo, C., & Dabrio, C. J. (2003). A Quaternary sea-level curve for the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. (Provides the geological context for the mid-Holocene highstand and the formation of inland embayments along the southeastern coast). 
• Hoskin, M. (2001). Tombs, Temples and their Orientations: A New Perspective on Mediterranean Prehistory. Ocarina Books.
• Lull, V., et al. (2014). The Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula.
• Málaga Guerrero, J. (2004). Las estelas decoradas en el megalitismo andaluz.
• Molina, F., et al. (2004). Los Millares y la periodización de la Prehistoria Reciente del Sureste. Simposio de Prehistoria Cueva de Nerja.
• Molina, F., & Cámara, J. A. (2005). Guía del Yacimiento Arqueológico Los Millares.
• Muñoz Amilibia, A. M. (1983). El poblado eneolítico del Cabezo del Plomo (Mazarrón, Murcia). Anales de la Universidad de Murcia.
• Murillo-Barroso, M., et al. (2018). Amber in prehistoric Iberia: New data and a review. PLOS One.
• Zafra, N., et al. (1999). Una macro-aldea en el origen del modo de vida campesino: Marroquíes Bajos (Jaén). Trabajos de Prehistoria.

Hola,

Estamos intentando identificar donde se tomó esta foto. El sello superior izquierdo pone Bilbao pero puede ser simplemente el estudio fotográfico.

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Desde finales de septiembre de 2026, debido al descontento por las deficientes instalaciones escolares, el excesivo hacinamiento, la escasez de profesores y otros problemas, numerosos estudiantes de secundaria de toda Francia han iniciado huelgas y protestas a gran escala. Muchas otras personas descontentas con el Gobierno y con la situación actual de la sociedad también se han sumado a ellas, y las protestas pacíficas se transformaron rápidamente en disturbios marcados por la violencia.
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Los manifestantes han provocado incendios en escuelas y otros lugares, destrozado automóviles, atacado a quienes se oponen a ellos y perseguido a policías que se encontraban aislados, entre otras acciones, dejando algunas localidades en una situación de desorden y parálisis. Los enfrentamientos han continuado durante la represión policial de los disturbios. Los principales partidos y figuras políticas han condenado la violencia o han llamado a protestar pacíficamente, pero aparentemente sin resultado: el movimiento de protesta ha quedado fuera de control y es probable que los disturbios sean difíciles de apaciguar a corto plazo.
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Se trata, una vez más, de un típico movimiento político radical al estilo francés. Cuando algunos franceses están descontentos con el Gobierno y con la situación existente, salen colectivamente a las calles para protestar. La mayoría expresa sus reivindicaciones de manera no violenta, pero una minoría de radicales recurre a la violencia, haciendo que las protestas degeneren en disturbios. Los actos violentos son numerosos, pero en su mayoría no son letales, tienen una intensidad baja o moderada y consisten principalmente en la destrucción de bienes, con relativamente pocas personas heridas. Van acompañados de enfrentamientos entre la policía y los manifestantes, mientras la sociedad queda en un estado de semiparálisis. Sin embargo, una vez superado el punto álgido de los disturbios, la sociedad recupera gradualmente la paz y una relativa estabilidad.
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Situaciones similares se producen con frecuencia en Francia: algunas tienen lugar en localidades concretas, mientras que otras se convierten en disturbios de alcance nacional. Los disturbios derivados del movimiento de los «chalecos amarillos» de 2018, así como las protestas y la serie de incidentes violentos desencadenados en 2023 después de que un policía matara a tiros a un adolescente, fueron movimientos radicales de alcance nacional acompañados de violencia política. Al igual que el actual, pueden calificarse de «movimientos populares a la francesa».
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Los movimientos populares y la violencia política callejera en Francia pueden remontarse a la época de la Revolución francesa, hace más de 230 años. En aquel entonces, las clases populares francesas derrocaron la monarquía y el dominio aristocrático mediante una revolución violenta, pagando el precio de mucho derramamiento de sangre y numerosas muertes, y provocándolos también. De este modo, abrieron el camino a las revoluciones democráticas de abajo arriba, pero también dejaron un legado de violencia política. Marcados por la experiencia de la Revolución e influidos por las ideas radicales sobre los derechos civiles, muchos franceses consideran que, cuando el Gobierno «se aparta de la voluntad popular», sus políticas son perjudiciales o la sociedad es injusta, el pueblo tiene derecho a expresar su ira y resistirse mediante diversos medios, incluida la revolución violenta.
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Este precedente revolucionario y esta conciencia popular han inspirado numerosos movimientos de masas y revueltas en Francia durante los más de dos siglos transcurridos desde entonces hasta la actualidad. Entre los más conocidos se encuentran la insurrección de la Comuna de París de 1871 y el «Mayo del 68». La mayoría de estos movimientos han tenido un marcado carácter populista de izquierdas, con la oposición a los privilegios y la búsqueda de la igualdad como ejes principales, y entre sus participantes se han encontrado jóvenes estudiantes, intelectuales y miembros de las clases urbanas bajas y medias. La capital, París, suele ser el centro de los movimientos políticos y de las actividades violentas.
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En comparación con los pueblos de otros países del mundo, los franceses sienten un interés especialmente intenso por la política, poseen una mayor conciencia cívica y participan en los asuntos públicos de manera más activa y radical, entre otras formas saliendo a las calles, utilizando medios violentos o no violentos para expresar sus reivindicaciones, enfrentándose a las autoridades gobernantes y entrando en conflicto con el aparato coercitivo del Estado. La sociedad francesa muestra un grado relativamente alto de tolerancia hacia las formas radicales de protesta y también está acostumbrada a la violencia política. Han transcurrido más de dos siglos y, aunque la intensidad de la violencia de los movimientos políticos franceses ha disminuido considerablemente —por ejemplo, el número de muertos se ha reducido en gran medida—, estos siguen siendo bastante «ardientes» y los enfrentamientos violentos continúan siendo frecuentes. Las recientes protestas y disturbios no son una excepción.
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Más concretamente, las protestas actuales tienen su origen en problemas antiguos y profundamente arraigados del sistema educativo francés. Aunque Francia es un país que concede una importancia considerable a la igualdad y al bienestar social, siguen existiendo graves desigualdades en la distribución de los recursos educativos. En los centros de secundaria de zonas relativamente remotas y desfavorecidas, así como en aquellos con una elevada presencia de hijos de personas de las clases bajas y medias, estudiantes no blancos e inmigrantes, la financiación educativa es escasa, la calidad del profesorado es inferior, las clases tienen demasiados alumnos y están excesivamente masificadas, las instalaciones escolares son antiguas y la proporción de estudiantes que logran ingresar en universidades prestigiosas también es muy baja, por lo que resulta difícil progresar socialmente. Mientras tanto, los hijos de las élites francesas de la política, los negocios y otros ámbitos suelen estudiar en prestigiosos centros privados de secundaria de tradición católica y con excelentes condiciones, y también tienen más facilidades para ingresar en universidades de élite y acceder a las clases altas.
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La desigual distribución de los recursos educativos, la concentración de los recursos de alta calidad en favor de las élites y el reforzamiento de la rigidez de las clases sociales a través de la educación son, en realidad, problemas comunes en todo el mundo, y Francia difícilmente puede ser una excepción. Sin embargo, los franceses, con una mayor conciencia de la igualdad, están especialmente descontentos con estas diferencias y protestan con frecuencia por ellas. El movimiento de Mayo del 68 ya incluía reivindicaciones como la igualdad educativa y la apertura de las universidades al conjunto de la población.
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El Gobierno francés también ha intentado reducir estas diferencias aumentando la financiación destinada a las regiones y escuelas pobres y desfavorecidas y proporcionando becas a los estudiantes con menos recursos. Sin embargo, bajo el «efecto Mateo», los recursos educativos continúan concentrándose entre una minoría procedente de las élites. Quienes ya disfrutan de ventajas adquiridas siempre disponen de más recursos para invertir en la educación de sus hijos, mientras que las personas procedentes de familias menos acomodadas se encuentran naturalmente en desventaja, por lo que las políticas de igualdad de oportunidades tienen un efecto limitado.
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Las protestas actuales son precisamente una explosión del descontento de estudiantes procedentes de familias relativamente pobres y que estudian en centros con peores condiciones. Sin embargo, su descontento no se debe únicamente a la desigualdad de los recursos educativos, sino también a su situación de desventaja y a la discriminación que sufren debido a su origen de clase y su identidad étnica, así como a la rigidez de las clases sociales, los conflictos étnicos y el pesimismo respecto a sus futuras perspectivas de empleo e ingresos. La ira y la desesperación acumuladas por la combinación de estos numerosos factores los han llevado a salir a las calles e incluso a recurrir a la violencia.
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Entre los jóvenes estudiantes que participan en las protestas actuales, muchos son «inmigrantes de segunda generación/descendientes de inmigrantes», no blancos y no cristianos, en su mayoría negros y musulmanes cuyas familias proceden de África y del mundo árabe. Enarbolan banderas de Argelia y Palestina, lo que refleja claramente sus identidades y posiciones, así como las diferencias que mantienen con la identidad y los valores de la población blanca autóctona de Francia.
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Desde la Revolución francesa, Francia ha proclamado los valores de «libertad, igualdad, fraternidad» y, efectivamente, ha logrado grandes avances en materia de derechos civiles y justicia social. Sobre la base de valores comunes y de la ciudadanía, también ha conseguido, con relativo éxito, construir una identidad nacional francesa y una comunidad nacional. Sin embargo, Francia todavía tiene que afrontar los difíciles problemas de la división de clases y la desigualdad entre ricos y pobres, las antiguas diferencias y contradicciones étnicas, así como la fractura social y la violencia política derivadas de ellas. Entre personas de diferentes identidades y posiciones sociales, colores de piel y creencias existen divisiones profundamente arraigadas que ni las instituciones democráticas, ni las ideas de la Ilustración, ni los movimientos sociales pueden eliminar de raíz.
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En los últimos años, la polarización política mundial se ha intensificado cada vez más, y Francia no es una excepción. Francia celebrará elecciones presidenciales en abril de 2027. Le Pen, de la formación de extrema derecha «Agrupación Nacional», aventaja ampliamente a los demás en intención de voto, seguida por Mélenchon, de «La Francia Insumisa», de extrema izquierda, mientras que las fuerzas tradicionales del establishment y los centristas registran bajos niveles de apoyo.
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Tanto la violencia política callejera protagonizada principalmente por el populismo de izquierda radical como el continuo aumento del apoyo al populismo de extrema derecha en las encuestas y las elecciones reflejan la intensificación de las contradicciones de la sociedad francesa y el agravamiento de su crisis. La violencia política que se produce con frecuencia, incluidas las protestas y disturbios actuales, constituye una manifestación periódica de los males que aquejan a Francia y, objetivamente, también recuerda a los franceses y al resto del mundo la necesidad de prestar atención a la existencia y las necesidades de quienes se encuentran en situaciones difíciles y están marginados.
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Según la experiencia del pasado, aunque la violencia política es frecuente en Francia, su intensidad es limitada. Después de que la gente haya descargado su ira, vuelve gradualmente a la calma, y la sociedad puede recuperar un estado de paz y volver a funcionar con normalidad. Tras más de dos siglos de adaptación, los franceses han desarrollado una convivencia tácita con formas de violencia política como las revoluciones y los disturbios, por lo que tampoco hay motivos para ser excesivamente pesimistas.
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El uso de la violencia en la participación política no es deseable, pero las voces y reivindicaciones de las clases populares también necesitan ser vistas y escuchadas. Sus sentimientos y demandas no deberían ser simplemente rechazados y estigmatizados, ni borrados únicamente porque sus formas de expresión incluyan violencia. Al mismo tiempo, mientras las masas populares entusiastas de los «movimientos populares a la francesa» expresan sus reivindicaciones y persiguen la igualdad, también deberían comprender y respetar las preocupaciones de los demás, tener en cuenta los intereses generales y a largo plazo de la sociedad y participar en la política de maneras más pacíficas y constructivas.

(El autor de este artículo, Wang Qingmin (王庆民), es un escritor chino residente en Europa e investigador de política internacional. El texto original está en chino.)

Words are territory. Whoever controls the name controls the reality that name designates. Whoever manages to impose their definition of the fundamental terms with which a civilization understands itself has won a battle that no army could win. This truth, known to linguists and practiced by politicians, has been understood with extraordinary clarity by the United States of America, which in the course of two centuries has carried out two of the most audacious semantic thefts in modern history: the hijacking of an entire continent and the hijacking of a two-thousand-year-old religious tradition.

These are not minor thefts. They are not linguistic inaccuracies that can be corrected with a footnote. They are power operations with geopolitical, cultural, and spiritual consequences that we continue to pay for, often without even realizing that something has been stolen from us.

This essay sets out to examine both instances of theft in their profound connection, because they are not separate phenomena: they are expressions of the same project of cultural hegemony that has defined the United States' relationship with the rest of the continent for more than two hundred years. The same impulse that transformed a country into a continent is now transforming a religious denomination into the entirety of Christianity. And in both cases, those who live south of the Rio Grande are the ones who suffer the most.

I. America: the continent stolen by a single country

Let's begin with the basic geography. America is a continent. Strictly speaking, it's a system of two continents—North America and South America—or, according to other equally valid cartographic traditions, a single continent stretching from the Arctic to Patagonia. What America is not, or shouldn't be, is the exclusive name of a single country.

The name was given by the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in his world map Universalis Cosmographia, published in 1507, in honor of the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci—one of the first Europeans to realize that the lands west of the Atlantic were not Asia, but a new continent previously unknown to the Old World. Waldseemüller applied the name "America" ​​to what is known today as South America. Later, Gerardus Mercator—in his 1538 map, commonly known as Orbis Imago despite lacking a formal title—extended the name to the entire continent, cementing its use in European cartography. Not just a part. Not just the northern portion. The entire continent, from north to south, was given that name.

For more than two centuries, the use of the term respected this geography. The inhabitants of what is now the United States called themselves, and were called by others, various names: settlers, American English, inhabitants of the colonies. The Revolution of 1776 created a new political entity whose official name was—and remains—"United States of America." A name that, it should be noted, implicitly acknowledges that America is something larger than the country, something of which the country is a part.

But during the 19th century, in parallel with the westward territorial expansion and the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine, something began to change in linguistic usage. The inhabitants of the United States began to appropriate the adjective "American" as their exclusive demonym. "American" ceased to mean "inhabitant of the American continent" and came to mean "inhabitant of the United States." And the noun "America" ​​began to be used, with increasing frequency and less questioning, as a synonym for that specific country.

II. The Monroe Doctrine and the Geography of Power

This semantic shift was not innocent. It occurred in the context of the formulation of what President James Monroe proclaimed in 1823 as U.S. foreign policy: "America for the Americans." The phrase, which in its original context was intended to exclude European powers from the affairs of the continent, already contained the ambiguity that would make it so useful for later hegemonic purposes: who are "the Americans" who should govern America? The implicit answer, which the 19th and 20th centuries would develop unequivocally, was: the U.S. citizens.

When the United States intervened militarily in Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Panama—and the list goes on—it did so invoking its right and responsibility as an "American" power. The appropriation of the name facilitated the theft of territory, resources, and sovereignty. If America is the United States, then what happens in the rest of the continent is, to some extent, an internal matter that the hegemonic power has the right to manage.

The linguistic geography of power is brutal in its consistency. Maps produced in the United States for school use routinely depict the world with North America at the center, with South America relegated to a secondary appendage in the lower left corner. The Mercator projection, dominant in Anglo-Saxon cartography, artificially inflates the size of northern countries and reduces those of the south. This is not a conspiracy: it is the sediment of centuries of a worldview in which the United States is the center and the rest of the planet is the periphery.

And in this depicted world, "America" ​​is the center. The rest are "Latin America," "South America," "Central America" and "North America": geographical appendages that derive their identity from their relationship to the center, not from their own inherent nature.

III. The Hispanic Resistance: A Battle We Have Failed to Win

What is extraordinary is that we Latin Americans have largely accepted this usurpation. We have accepted it in our own languages, in our own media, in our own everyday conversations. We have begun to call Americans "Americans"—even in Spanish, which has no phonetic need to do so—and to call "America" ​​the country that stole the continent's name.

In Spanish, there is a perfectly available solution that few languages has: "Estadounidense" (American/U.S. citizen). It is a precise, unambiguous adjective that designates exactly what it needs to designate: an inhabitant of the United States. It has no phonetic or grammatical problems. It is in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. And yet, its use is in the minority, even among Spanish speakers who should have the most reason to prefer it.

The reason for this abandonment is complex. It has to do with the massive cultural penetration of English, which, through film, television, music, and digital media, has imposed its linguistic categories on other languages ​​as well. It has to do with the asymmetry of power: when the stronger imposes its name, the weaker tends to adopt it. It also has to do with a certain intellectual laziness and a lack of awareness of the political weight of everyday words.

But above all, it has to do with the success of a hegemonic project that doesn't need tanks to impose itself: Hollywood films, streaming series, social media, the music industry, and the architecture of global information systems are enough. When all those channels say "America" ​​and show New York City or Los Angeles, the association becomes so automatic that questioning it seems eccentric.

However, resisting it is a political and cultural act of the first order. Every time a Hispanic says "Estadounidense" instead of "American," they are refusing to participate in the usurpation. They are affirming, with a single word, that America belongs to all of us who live in it: Mexicans and Guatemalans, Colombians and Peruvians, Brazilians and Argentinians, Caribbeans and Central Americans, Canadians, and, yes, also the inhabitants of the United States, who are Americans just like us, no more and no less.

IV. The Same Mechanism: From Geography to Faith

What makes examining the appropriation of "America" ​​and the appropriation of "Christian" together so illuminating is that the mechanism is identical. In both cases, it involves taking a term that designates a broad, diverse, and plural reality and appropriating it to designate exclusively a part of that reality: the part that corresponds to the United States or to the Anglo-Saxon Protestant cultural tradition.

The term "Christian," in its correct historical and theological sense, designates every follower of Jesus Christ, regardless of the denomination to which they belong. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants of all denominations, Anglicans, Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians, Maronites: all are, in the proper sense of the term, Christians. The term does not designate a specific denomination: it designates the totality of those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

This plurality is ancient. The schism between the Church of Rome and the Eastern churches dates back to 1054. The Protestant Reformation dates from the 16th century. But even after these ruptures, the term "Christian" continued to be used to designate the totality of traditions that share that common root. Protestants didn't say "we are the only Christians": they said "we are a different kind of Christian," "we are the reformation of Christianity," "we are Christianity purified." The term remained shared.

What has been happening in Latin America in recent decades is qualitatively different. And its origin, once again, lies north of the Rio Grande.

V. The American Protestant Tradition and the Definition of the “True Christian”

To understand the second theft, it is necessary to understand something of the religious history of the United States. American national identity was built, from its colonial origins, on a strongly Protestant foundation. The Mayflower pilgrims were Puritans fleeing the Church of England. The New England colonies had a distinctly Calvinist character. The Revolution itself was, in part, a revolution against a monarchy identified with Jacobite Catholicism.

This legacy left a deep mark on American religious culture: the idea that “true” Christianity is Protestantism, and that Catholicism is a deviation, a corruption, a form of idolatry disguised as Christian faith. This view—which theologians call “anti-Catholic antinomianism”—was for centuries a central element of the American religious imagination. The Irish and German immigrants who arrived in the 19th century were met with a distrust that stemmed from both anti-Catholicism and xenophobia. The Ku Klux Klan, in its 20th-century incarnation, persecuted not only Black people but also Catholics and Jews.

This tradition of equating "Christian" with "Protestant" is in the DNA of the evangelical movements exported to Latin America. When a neo-Pentecostal pastor from the United States, or one trained in the American tradition, says "Christian," they are not using the term in its ecumenical and theologically precise sense; they are using it in the specific cultural sense of their tradition, which implicitly excludes Catholicism.

VI. The Spiritual Conquest of the South: How the Equation Was Exported

The export of this equation—Christian equals evangelical Protestant—to Latin America was not a spontaneous process. Like the geographical theft of "America," it was a deliberate process, with identifiable actors, traceable funding, and concrete political and cultural objectives.

David Stoll, in his work Is Latin America Becoming Protestant? (1990), documented the explosive growth of evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism in Latin America beginning in the 1960s and analyzed the conditions that made it possible: the weakening of popular Catholicism, rapid urbanization, and the void left by institutions that failed to address the spiritual and community needs of migrant populations. He also documented the role of U.S. missionary organizations in this growth: the Summer Institute of Linguistics—with documented ties to the CIA—the Peace Corps in its religious dimension, and evangelical denominations with massive funding from the North.

In Tongues of Fire (1990), Martin analyzed how Pentecostalism adapted to the Latin American context by adopting local cultural forms, but maintaining a theology and institutional structure deeply marked by its North American origins. The "gift of tongues" may be expressed in Spanish or Portuguese, but the underlying theology, the ecclesiology, the relationship with political and economic power—all of this bears the stamp of its origins.

Brouwer, Gifford, and Rose, in Exporting the American Gospel (1996), were perhaps the most explicit in analyzing how this process of religious export was inseparable from the geopolitical and cultural interests of the United States: the expansion of North American evangelicalism in Latin America was functional—in many cases deliberately functional—to the containment of communism, the weakening of Liberation Theology, and the creation of a social base favorable to neoliberal economic reforms.

The result, half a century later, is a far-reaching linguistic transformation: in large parts of Latin America, "Christian" has begun to mean, in everyday usage, "Evangelical Protestant." The term that for two thousand years designated all followers of Christ is being appropriated by a specific, recently formed tradition with Anglo-Saxon cultural roots, which uses it to distinguish itself from Catholicism—implicitly disqualified as non-Christian or as second-class Christian.

VII. The Implicit Disqualification of Catholicism

This linguistic slip has practical and theological consequences that deserve careful examination.

When someone says "I converted to Christianity" meaning "I left Catholicism and became an Evangelical," they are implicitly asserting that Catholicism is not Christianity. They are saying that the world's two billion Catholics, the eight hundred million historical Protestants, the three hundred million Orthodox Christians: none of them are truly Christian, or at least not as truly Christian as the neo-Pentecostal Evangelical who has just "converted."

This assertion is not only theologically incorrect. It is historically absurd. Catholicism is not a denomination within Christianity: it is the oldest Christian tradition, the one that goes directly back to the apostolic communities of the first century. Protestantism was born in the sixteenth century as a reform of that tradition. Neo-Pentecostalism was born in the twentieth century as an expression of Protestantism. To call someone a "convert to Christianity" when they abandon two thousand years of Christian tradition to join a one-hundred-year-old movement, born in Los Angeles in 1906 during the Azusa Street Revival, is an exercise in historical inversion of monumental proportions.

But the effectiveness of this semantic appropriation doesn't depend on its historical accuracy. It depends on its repetition, its naturalization, the way it gradually permeates everyday usage until it becomes invisible. And in that sense, the appropriation is remarkably successful.

In Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Chile, it's increasingly common to hear phrases like "she's not Catholic, she's Christian," "in my family there are five Catholics and three Christians," "I left the Church and became a Christian." Each of these phrases contains an implicit assertion about Catholicism that no serious theologian—not even serious Protestant theologians—would be willing to endorse: that Catholicism is outside of Christianity.

VIII. Language as a Battlefield: The Grammar of Power

Neither of the two semantic thefts we examine in this essay is simply a linguistic error. Both are expressions of power relations inscribed in everyday language, which, once naturalized, reproduce those power relations invisibly and continuously.

The philosopher of language Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of "symbolic violence" to describe precisely this phenomenon: the imposition of categories of perception and thought that reproduce the order of domination without the need for physical coercion. Symbolic violence is effective precisely because it is invisible: the dominated do not experience it as violence but as the natural order of things, as the way the world simply is.

Saying "American" when you mean "U.S. citizen" doesn't seem like a political act. It simply seems like normal language use. Saying "Christian" when you mean "Evangelical Protestant" doesn't seem like a theological statement. It simply seems like the way people talk. But behind this apparent normality lies a history of power, funding, cultural strategy, and ideological penetration that is anything but natural and is highly deliberate.

Bourdieu also pointed out that resistance to symbolic violence begins with naming it: by making visible what is presented as invisible, by historicizing what is presented as natural, by politicizing what is presented as merely linguistic. This essay is, among other things, an exercise in that naming.

IX. The Deep Connection: The Same Project, Two Fronts

What makes examining these two instances of theft together particularly important is that they reveal a deep connection.

They are not parallel and independent phenomena: they are two dimensions of the same project of American cultural hegemony over Latin America.

The project has a remarkable coherence. If America is the United States, then the history, culture, and values ​​of America are, primarily, those of the United States. If Christianity is Protestant evangelicalism of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, then true faith, authentic spirituality, and the correct relationship with God are those defined and exported by that tradition. In both cases, the same operation occurs: the universalization of the American particular, the presentation of the Anglo-American cultural experience as the universal standard to which the rest of the world should aspire.

This operation is at the heart of cultural imperialism in its contemporary form. Formal colonies are no longer needed. The flag and the army are no longer needed—although these remain available when required. What is needed is control of language, the media, digital platforms, the entertainment industry, and networks of religious influence. With this control, cultural colonization occurs spontaneously, from within, with the enthusiastic—and often unconscious—collaboration of the colonized themselves.

The person who says "American" when they mean "U.S. citizen," and who says "Christian" when they mean "Evangelical Protestant," is not necessarily a conscious agent of cultural imperialism. More likely, they are someone who has internalized linguistic categories presented to them as natural, and who reproduces them without realizing that with each use they are contributing to the consolidation of a representational order that is unfavorable to them.

X. The Consequences for Latin American Identity

The semantic appropriations we have examined are not academic abstractions. They have concrete consequences for how Latin Americans think about themselves, relate to their history, and construct their collective identity.

If "America" ​​is the United States, then we are not America. We are "Latin America," "Ibero-America," “Hispanic America," "the subcontinent": terms that define us in relation to a center that is not us, as peripheral variants of a reality that finds its full expression elsewhere. We lose the right to the name of the continent we inhabit, and with that name, we lose something of our geographical and cultural dignity.

If "Christian" is synonymous with "Evangelical Protestant," then Latin American Catholics—who are the majority and who have more than five centuries of religious history on this continent—are left in a strange position: either we are second-class Christians, or we are not truly Christian at all. In any case, our religious tradition is presented as deficient, as needing correction, as an inferior stage of spiritual development that can only be overcome through "conversion" to evangelicalism.

Both losses are losses of dignity. And both serve the same project: the construction of a Latin American subjectivity that sees itself reflected in the American mirror, that measures its own worth in relation to that mirror, and that is therefore perpetually indebted, perpetually incomplete, perpetually in need of the North's tutelage.

XI. The Possible Resistance: Naming, Recovering, Affirming. What to do in the face of these thefts?

The answer is neither linguistic purism nor cultural isolationism. Languages ​​change, terms migrate, meanings transform: this is unavoidable and, to a large extent, desirable. Resistance does not consist of freezing the language but of exercising a critical awareness that distinguishes between natural linguistic change and deliberate semantic colonization.

In the case of "America," resistance begins with the systematic and conscious use of "American" as a demonym, and with the recovery of the use of "America" ​​as the name of the entire continent. It means saying, naturally and without hesitation, "I am American" when one is Colombian or Argentinian or Honduran, because one is an inhabitant of the American continent. It means questioning, in everyday conversation and in public spaces, the usurpation that turned a country into a continent.

In the case of "Christian," resistance begins with terminological precision: calling what is evangelical, Protestant, or neo-Pentecostal "evangelical," "Protestant," or "neo-Pentecostal," and reserving the term "Christian" for its correct historical and theological use, which includes Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of all traditions. It means questioning, when someone says "I converted to Christianity" meaning "I left Catholicism," the implicit assertion contained in that usage. Not aggressively, but with the clarity of someone who knows that words matter.

But above all, resistance consists of understanding the connection between these two appropriations and what they reveal about the cultural project that produced them. Understanding that they are not coincidences or inaccuracies: they are symptoms of a power relationship inscribed in language because language is one of its most effective instruments.

XII. A Final Note on Irony

There is a historical irony in the fact that the movements most actively appropriating the term "Christian" in Latin America are also frequently those most actively reproducing the cultural imaginary of the United States: English-language praise music, megachurch architecture modeled on American sports stadiums, the business-oriented management of churches, and the prosperity theology that sacralizes the "American Dream"—the U.S. Dream, it should be said—as a spiritual project.

And there is an equally great irony in the fact that these same movements are the ones most frequently invoking cultural sovereignty, indigenous values, and resistance to "imperialism" when it comes to defending their positions in political debates. They claim to defend Latin America while importing, reproducing, and disseminating the most characteristically American cultural product of recent decades.

The theft of words is also, in this sense, the theft of the ability to see clearly what is happening to us. When we don't have the right name for things, it becomes harder to understand them and harder to resist them.

That's why words matter. That's why the name of the continent matters. That's why the name of faith matters. Not because language is more important than reality, but because language is one of the ways in which reality is constructed, imposed, and, eventually, transformed.

America is a continent. A Christian is someone who follows Christ, wherever they come from and however they pray. These are not trivial statements. In the context of what we have examined, they are acts of resistance.