During excavations in the province of Soria, archaeologists have uncovered an unlooted 3rd-century BCE workshop dedicated to the production of inscribed bronze documents. The site, identified as a Celtiberian Scriptorium, yielded several dozen intact iron styluses, clay molds for casting metal plates, and five finished bronze tablets featuring a late version of the Paleohispanic script. This discovery provides the first direct physical evidence of a centralized administrative system for record-keeping among the Celtiberian tribes prior to the Roman conquest of the region.
One of the tablets appears to be a legal contract between two rival clans concerning the rights to local silver mines, written in a sophisticated poetic meter. The scriptorium was found preserved under a layer of ash, suggesting it was quickly abandoned during a conflict. The presence of these written records suggests that the level of literacy and civil bureaucracy in pre-Roman Spain was far more advanced than historical accounts by Roman writers typically suggested.