This is a book about the later prehistory of one part of Europe, the west Mediterranean, with the main attention devoted to three provinces in south-east Spain. These provinces are recognised by European prehistorians as containing one of the key sequences for the study of the emergence of more complex cultures in the third and second millennia be. The emergence of these cultures is placed within the wider context of contemporary cultures in Spain and Portugal, and in other parts of the west Mediterranean. While aiming to understand the specific details of cultural change within south-east Spain, I am convinced of the need to place such localised analyses within a wider comparative context, and to examine the emergence of complexity as a general anthropological problem.

My interest in the prehistory of south-east Spain was aroused during my student days by reading Colin Renfrew's (1967a) critique of diffusionist explanations for the development of Copper and Bronze Age cultures in this area. Such an explanation had been expressed most recently in the English language in Beatrice Blance's Edinburgh doctoral thesis and in her subsequent publications (1960, 1961, 1964). Diffusionism also had a central role in the synthesis of Iberian prehistory published by Savory (1968). If, as Renfrew argued, diffusionist explanations were flawed, both theoretically and empirically, then there was considerable scope for research into the autonomous decelopment of complexity.