Horse rider spearing the enemy. Sculptural group of Cerrillo Blanco (Porcuna, Jaén, Spain)

Exempt sculptural group with three characters representing the final moment of a struggle. The rider is in an upright position and is tied with a tunic with a beaked neck, girded by a belt and finished in two fliers. In the chest he wears a disc-shaped protective breastplate that is held with thick cross bands with smaller disks on his shoulders. The back is also protected with another similar disk. It is adorned by four-turn spiral bracelets and the legs are protected with grebas. A dagger with a sheathed gable. He sets out to kill his opponent, fallen on the ground. For it he carries a circular shield in his left hand and a spear in his right. The right hand has an oqueity for the possible adaptation of the spear. The enemy fallen on the ground carries a shield in one hand, remaining the other immobilized under the foot of the winning warrior. His face has not been preserved, but some features of the torso and the head are appreciated. He wears a tunic with a beaked neck and on his chest he wears a sheathed sword, held by a cross band. The spear could enter him by the neck or by the mouth and crosses his body, being stuck to the back. The horse, braked next to the rider, is caged with a rosette head. Dimensions Height = 1.2 m Width = 1 m Maximum thickness = 48 cm This scene belongs to the group of duels of the sculptural group of Cerrillo Blanco (Porcuna, Jaén, Spain), is the largest and most complex group in the whole group. War defines the space and time of aristocratic representation. The war is conceived as a sum of individual or monomachian fighting. In Porcuna we collect five cases of duels that together constitute an authentic seriation of the usual scenes of a single duel: in one the defeated rider is standing; has released the shield when receiving the impact of a falcata on his body, in another the rider has fallen and raises his arm to grab the leg of the winning warrior, the third scene is this in which the character lying on the ground touched of death because a spear crosses him from the face to l However, it is not the dismissal of a mourning because the deaths of the defeated are different: with falcata wound on the left side of the trunk, with spear on the face or with wound on the right shoulder, on the contrary they are different duels that refer to some collective fact that can respond to a ritual of games of fight with death or to the narration of a past fact that were protagonists the adult warriors of the lineage. It is significant that almost all of the heads have been crushed when the monument was destroyed. The faces of both groups, victors and defeated, have been meticulously shattered, reflecting a deep aristocratic conception: if both groups have the right to memory, destruction affects both equally. The glory of the victor does not exist without his mirror of the defeated: both are heroes and complement each other. Currently the sculptures from Cerrillo Blanco can be visited in the Provincial Museum of Jaén and the archeological site in Porcuna (Jaén) is also visible, since it is one of the stops of the cultural route “Journey to the time of the Iberos” with which it is intended to value the iberas first level traces existing in the province of Jaén. BIBLIOGRAPHY Chapa, T. (2015): “Los escultores del Cerrillo Blanco de Porcuna,” in A. Ruiz y M. Molinos (coord.): Jaén, ibera land. 40 years of research and transfer. University of Jaén. Jaén. Olmos, R. (2002): “The sculptural groups of Cerrillo Blanco de Porcuna (Jaén). A convergent iconographic reading essay.” Spanish Archive of Archaeology, 75 107-122. Ruiz, A. and Molinos, M. (2015): “The sculptural group of Cerrillo Blanco, Porcuna,” in A. Ruiz and M. Molinos (Eds.): Jaén, Iberian land 40 Years of research and transfer. University of Jaén. 67-84. Torrecillas, J. F. (1985): The late period cemetery of Cerrillo Blanco. Institute of Giennenses Studies. Jaén.