Summary
The North-West of Iberia constitutes a vibrant research area to assess recent archaeological debates on the management of power within Late Iron Age societies. Over the last three decades, several authors have built detailed archaeological narratives interpreting the cultural and political dynamics in this region during the first millennium BCE. As a result, diverse models of non-hierarchical societies driven by different theoretical approaches have been proposed to understand social landscapes in the region. In this paper, I analyse subsistence strategies, and crafts production and consumption at the hillfort of El Castru, in Vigaña (Belmonte de Miranda, Asturias). Assumptions arising from the study of this small hillfort are confronted with the different interpretative models under discussion for Late Iron Age social landscapes in the region, ranging from Celtic chiefdoms to egalitarian or heterarchical societies. These considerations allow us to emphasise how future archaeological investigations may challenge current readings on Late Iron Age political economies, and how those mediated the cultural and social changes deriving from colonial encounters with the Roman power at the end of the first millennium BCE. We should not be content with apparently solid social interpretations of the Late Iron Age in the North-West of Iberia. Indeed, fresh datasets, novel research methods or innovative questions provide us with opportunities to build nuanced interpretations of how Late Iron Age groups managed power.