NUMANTIA
(Muela de Garray) Soria, Spain.
Site 7 km N of Soria. The cultural sequence on the
hill is as follows: 1) Material from the final phase of the
Neolithic Age and from the Copper Age; 2) Iron Age
occupation, with a later castrum dating from the 4th-3d
c. B.C., possibly beginning ca. 850 B.C.; 3) Celtiberian
Numancia, of the Arevaci, from the beginning of the
3d c. to 133 B.C.; 4) Roman town of the Augustan age,
rebuilt after being abandoned for a century and lingering on to the end of the 4th c.; 5) Visigoth town or perhaps merely isolated buildings. Some of these phases may have included destruction and reconstruction; this certainly occurred with the invasion of the Franks and the Alamanni in the 3d c.
The fame of Numantia comes from its ten years of
sustained and successful struggle against the Roman
armies, a struggle which actually began in 153 and ended
with the destruction and burning of the town in 133.
The primary source is Appian, who obtained his information from Polybios, a friend and chronicler of Scipio and an eyewitness of the siege; also L. Anneus Florus (1.5, 9; 33.1, 13; 34.1, 5, 7, 10, 11, 17; 47.3) and many
others (Diodorus Siculus, Livy, Dio Cassius, Frontinus,
Paulus Orosius, and later Pliny and Strabo).
The history of Numantia is linked to the insurrections
of the Celtiberians against the abuses of the Romans:
the first of importance was in 197, which caused Cato
to attack the towns of the Meseta; disturbances again
occurred in 193 when the Arevaci helped the Vetones,
Vaccaei, and Lusitani, causing Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus to attack them in 180. He defeated them near the Moncayo and reached a peace agreement which lasted until 154, the date of the great rising of the Celtiberians
and the Lusitani. The insurrection began in Segeda (Belmonte), and Q. Fulvius Nobilior moved against it with
an army of 30,000 men. The Belli and the Titi took
refuge in Numantia with their chieftain Caros. Nobilior
razed Segeda and in August 153 advanced on Numantia.
He was fiercely attacked by the Celtiberians, defeated at
Uxama (Osma) and Ocilis, and forced to take refuge in
the Renieblas camp, where he spent the winter of 153-152 B.C. He relinquished his command to his successor,
M. Claudius Marcellus, who skillfully pacified the region. A peace treaty was signed in 151, which lasted until
143, despite the atrocities of Lucullus at Cauca (Coca)
and elsewhere. In 144 the Viriathus rising ended in a
peace agreement; Q. Caecilius Metellus, after conquering
Contrebia, the Lusitanian capital, and the tribes in the
Jalon valley, laid waste the territory of the Vaccaei and
attacked the Arevaci who took refuge in Numantia and
Termantia (142). The war was resumed in 137 by C.
Hostilius Mancinus, who was roundly defeated and capitulated, but the Senate again refused to recognize the
peace agreement and left the Roman general to the
mercy of the Numantians, naked, shackled, and on his
knees before the walls of the town.
Finally in 134 Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus
reorganized the demoralized army, seized supplies from
the Vaccaei, and blockaded the hill town with a circumvallation 9 km long, supported by six camps, with wall, ditch, and towers. Against the 10,000 Numantians, of which only 4000 were under arms, Scipio deployed 60,000
men, elephants, slingers, and Jugurtha's Numidian archers,
cavalry furnished by Spanish auxiliaries, and 300 catapults. But it was hunger which finally defeated Numantia.
Scipio refused to accept any terms other than unconditional surrender and the laying down of arms, so the
defenders burned the town and most of them killed themselves. Only a few surrendered. Numantia was reduced
to ashes in the summer of 133, after a nine-month siege,
and reconstruction of the town was forbidden. In the
triumph Rome gave to Scipio in 132, so poor was Numantia that only seven denarii could be distributed to each soldier.
The Muela de Garray is a hill 67 m high, protected
by the Douro and the Tera, which meet at its foot to
the W, and by the Merdancho (Merdancius) on the S;
the N, S, and especially the W slopes are precipitous,
while the E slope is gentle. According to Appian and
Orosius the perimeter of the town of 150 ha was 4400 m,
but excavations have given axes of 310 and 720 m and
an area of ca. 24 ha. The center of the Celtiberian town
lay slightly W of the crest of the hill: two long streets
parallel to the main axis were crossed at right angles by
11 others, with steps at the intersections. A street parallel
to the wall surrounded the urban complex, and the central part and the first two ring streets appear to be the oldest. The trapezoidal wall, built of boulders, is 3.4 m thick at its base and still stands to a height of 2 m,
backed by houses facing inwards; excavations have unearthed two gates, simple openings in the wall. The
streets were paved with small cobblestones but repaired
with larger ones; they had raised sidewalks and stepping
stones for crossing the gutter. The houses were arranged
in rectangular blocks with exterior dry pebblestone walls;
the surviving houses are Roman, with a cellar or storeroom, and one or two stories high. On the S slope there
are two small circles of large stones, assumed to be platforms on which the dead were exposed (Silius Italicus, Elianus).
The Roman streets are clearly built over the Celtiberian ones, and usually separated from them by a layer of debris and ashes. In some cases they have been regularized and widened, and the pavement consists of large
well-joined slabs. In the so-called first street was discovered the remains of a temple, at the place thought to
be a forum of modest proportions and design. Numantia
was undoubtedly reconstructed in the Augustan period as
a town with ius peregrinum for the subjected Celtiberians, to protect the road from Asturica Augusta to Caesar-augusta. It is difficult to distinguish the Roman houses from earlier ones of the native type. They have no mosaic pavements or drains but have regular two-course
ashlar walls bound with clay; in addition to the usual
roofs of wood and boughs, tegulae, imbrices, and antefixes have been found; the Celtiberian silos of the houses
were replaced by cisterns for collecting runoff water.
Numantia may have had an amphitheater or theater on
the N slope, of which only the cavea can be seen. There
are also remains of large houses: one with a caldarium
may have been a public bath.
On the surrounding hills were built the Roman camps:
that on the Atalaya de Renieblas, 8 km away, was reconstructed five times and remains of all the reconstructions
survive (Cato in 195, 193-181, Nobilior in 153 m accordance with the Vitruvian model, Mancinus in 137, and
Scipio; the last occupation was in 75-74 in the wars between Sertorius and Pompey). Peñarredonda, on the S,
has well-defined ruins, what is assumed to be the camp
of Maximus with cavalry quarters and the houses of the
tribunes; there are remains on the Castillejo, on the N of
the camps of Marcellus (ruins of the praetorium and the
house of the tribune), Pompey, and Scipio, some remains
of the catapult platform at Valdeborrón, on the E, and
walls of the forts of Travesadas, Dehesilla, Alto Real, el
Molino, Vega, and Saledilla, some of which perhaps were
reused Celtiberian settlements.
All these camps have yielded remains of weapons, projectiles, ornaments, for the most part Celtiberian, as is
the pottery. This is basically wheel-turned, smoked,
painted pottery with animated scenes, many in the Iron
Age tradition, and terra sigillata. Bronze fibulae, necklaces, rings, belt buckles, surgical instruments, and needles have also been found, and clay slingshots, few weapons, trumpets, horns, clay nozzles, an occasional iron
tool, circular grindstones, Hispano-Roman and Imperial
coins. The finds are in the Numantia Museum, the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, and the museums of Mainz and Bonn.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Varios,
Excavaciones de Numancia
(1912); A. Schulten,
Numantia. Die Ergebnisse der Ausgrabungen 1905-1912: I.
Die Keltiberer und ihre Kriege
mit Rom. II. Die Stadt Numantia. III.
Die Lager der
Scipio. IV.
Die Lager bei Renieblas (1914-31); id.,
Historia de Numancia (1945); B. Taracena,
La cerámica
ibérica de Numancia (1923); id.,
Numancia (1929); id.,
Carta Arqueológica de España:
Soria (1941); id., “Los pueblos celtibéricos,”
Historia de España de Menéndez Pidal I, 3 (1954) 197; F. Wattemberg,
Las cerámics indígenas de Numancia (1963); A. Beltrán, “Un corte estratigráfico en Numancia,”
VIII Congreso Arqueológico Nacional (1964) 451; T. Ortego,
Guia de Numancia (1967); A. García y Bellido,
Numantia (1969).
A. BELTRAN
