Image Details

Headless Horseman
stone, 450 B.C.
In the province of Albacete, several Iberian funerary monuments were crowned with horses, some of them with riders astride their mounts—perhaps galloping from this world into the next. This sculpture, found in the 1980s, comes from the necropolis of Los Villares, near the present-day town of Hoya Gonzalo. The Iberians included elements of the natural world in their funerary sculpture to suggest the continuity between life and death. Animals such as bulls, horses and wolves probably symbolized the transition between those two worlds.