[pepsi_junkie]

The latest excavations and the result of Carbon 14 dating indicate that La Bastida was probably the most powerful city of Europe during the Bronze Age and a fortified site since it was first built, in circa 2,200 BCE, with a defence system never before seen in Europe.

This is the sort of flawed thinking that grates at me. The logic goes thus:

• We found a really impressive city
• It's the only one like we've found
• Therefore it is the only one of its kind
• Therefore it is the most powerful in all of Europe
• Therefore it was built by aliens

That last one is a joke but it illustrates that the prior assumptions were based on equally flawed logic.

[Happy Rain]

If you spent half your life scrapping in the dirt and finally found something to maybe justify your professional existence would you downplay it?

I remember a while back when various australopithecine fossils were being found all over East and Southern Africa and each finding was always presented as a bit older than the previous oldest. The competition to find the original “missing link” almost had early hominids riding dinosaurs...but then modern academia has been so corrupted by the Leftist agenda it now resembles the "Shadow Science" of the former Soviet Union and thus all theories and discoveries must be taken with a grain of salt big enough to sink the Titanic if it were floating in the North Atlantic.

[hinckley buzzard]

It does seem they feel obliged to spin an elaborate story out of not much. I suspect puffing up the importance of a "find" is useful in securing additional grant money to finance the next phase of the project.

[SunkenCiv]

The site is the largest heavily fortified site in Europe known from that time; it’s a reasonable guess that it didn’t get built so sissy inhabitants could cower down behind the walls when their more powerful neighbors came in. As with the somewhat later Mycenaean sites in Greece and at Troy, the high-walled citadel was the stronghold from which a city-state was ruled, and that most of the habitation was outside the walls, iow, not yet identified and excavated.

IMHO, it’s also reasonable to guess that it’s the first one found, but nowhere near the last one of its kind in Europe.

[Little Ray]

Oh, c’mon. EVERYBODY knows that the Basques are direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and this is fortress was merely an outpost of mighty Atlantis.