The Pintia Project was born in 1999 thanks to a project financed byl the Ministry of Science and Technology in which numerous companies and public and private entities collaborated to create infrastructures and investigate and disseminate the knowledge generated from this vaccaean oppidum. Some of these companies, such as Tempos Vega-Sicilia Group, still collaborate with the project more than twenty years later and have been incorporated into the CEVFW Board of Trustees.
Thus, throughout forty years and especially in the last twenty, the P.I. of the Pintia Project and his team have built-up and improved a work center nearby the archaeological site, located at Padilla de Duero / Peñafiel (Valladolid). This center has the necessary conditions for a dignified practice in Archeology, as well as to guarantee the preservation of the exhumed materials. Besides archaeologists, the CEVFW includes professors in Comparative Human and Animal Anatomy, Condensed Matter Physics, Education, Computer Science, and Architecture, within an interdisciplinary perspective that is always necessary for archaeological studies.
In a labile vaccean historiography, the Pintia Archaeological Zone has become the best-known place in the extensive vaccean territory thanks to our research. In particular, vast information have been provided about its cremation cemetery (the only one known and published), or about the wood and mud architecture so characteristic of its area of habitat, about the complex defensive systems of the city (typical of a Mediterranean poliorketikos hitherto undocumented in the Iberian Peninsula), or its pottery neighborhood (with documentation of the largest and best-preserved kiln of its kind in all of Europe).
Sectoral studies have allowed us to delve into the idiosyncrasies of this pre-Roman people, referring to their weapons (Monte Bernorio daggers, curved-edged daggers), ornaments such as fibulae (the best collection in the entire Iberian Peninsula after Numancia, with almost four hundred pieces, which is currently the subject of a doctoral thesis in an advanced stage of development), unique excise productions, goldsmithing with ceramic replicas, some burnished black turned ceramics, etc.
Last but not least, specific efforts have been dedicated to the enhancement of the preservation of the archaeological site and its public valorization and appreciation. In this sense, we have rehabilitated the landscape of the Las Ruedas necropolis with a series of milestones for its visit and implemented a whole battery of actions (e.g., educational programs, conference cycles, open days, FICAB’s traveling headquarters, participation in INRAP’s European Archeology Conference, archeology exhibitions, guided tours, creation of the Vaccea publishing house, etc.) that in the end we believe have given their result in an active position of citizens in the enjoyment and defense of their historical-cultural heritage.