Evidence found of final battle between Rome and indigenous Catalonians

Archaeologists from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (AUB) have discovered a Roman military camp from the final battle of the indigenous Iberian Ceretani revolt at Collet de Jovell in the eastern Pyrenees Mountains of Catalonia. The battle location was previously believed to have been further west, but the artifacts found at the site conclusively link it to the final suppression of the Ceretani in 39 B.C., shifting the last fight firmly into ancient Cerdanya, their ancestral territory.

Cassius Dio wrote about the uprising and its brutal consequences in Roman History, Book XLVIII, Chapter 42:

There was another [revolt] on the part of the Cerretani in Spain, and they were subjugated by Calvinus after he had met with a preliminary success and also a reverse, — the latter through his lieutenant, who was ambushed by the barbarians and deserted by his soldiers. Calvinus undertook no operation against the enemy until he had punished these deserters; calling them together as if for some other purpose, he made the rest of the army surround them, and then put to death every tenth man in two centuries and punished many of the centurions, including the one who was serving in the primus pilus, as it is called.⁠ After doing this and gaining, like Marcus Crassus, a reputation for his disciplining of his army, he set out against his opponents and with no great difficulty vanquished them.

The Calvinus Dio is talking about was the governor of Hispania Citerior, Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus, and the punishment he inflicted on the troops who fled was the infamous decimation. In this case Dio claims it did the trick, as the Ceretani uprising was rapidly suppressed after the ambush.

The recovered materials—including both clavi caligae (iron studs from Roman legionary sandals) and other militaria (sling bullets, fibulae, coins, etc.)—date the site to the second half of the 1st century BCE. However, the discovery of two inscribed sling bullets has allowed for much more precise dating. Researchers identify the inscription preserved on two of these bullets—CN(eus) D(omitius)—with Gn. Domitius Calvinus, Augustus’s representative in the province of Hispania Citerior in 39 BCE and commander of the troops that fought against the Ceretani. The team’s main hypothesis is that the site corresponds to a Roman military camp linked to the fighting during that episode, situated at a strategic point of access to the Cerdanya plain.

This clash was not just the last fight of the Ceretani revolt. It is the last documented armed conflict between any of the indigenous peoples of Catalonia and Rome. After their defeat, Ceretani settlements were targeted for destruction by Rome and abandoned.

* This article was originally published here