in Western Europe able to implement a system of underground water collection, whose installment is possibly connected to the surface water crisis caused by the 4.2 kiloyear event. A number of these Bronze Age settlements, the motillas, were built over Chalcolithic settlements. During the Iron Age II (La Tène culture), the territory occupied by the current provinces of Ciudad Real and Albacete had a larger influence from Punic-Phoenician and Greek colonists, while the territory occupied by the current provinces of Toledo, Guadalajara and Cuenca was more influenced by the substrate of the earlier Atlantic Bronze, helping to line up the diffuse separation of two large groups of pre-Roman peoples ("Iberi" and "Celtiberi"). Iberian-related peoples dwelling the southern rim of the inner plateau such as the Oretani and Contestani were organised in tribes ruled by a kinglet or chieftain, each one controlling a number of settlements. The main cog of the Iberian form of settlement was the oppidum. From the 7th century BC onward, the Celtiberian settlements were characterised instead by the somewhat smaller castros. Antiquity In the 2nd century BC, by the time of the advent of the Roman conquest wars, the first actual cities had begun to grow in the inner plateau. The Roman conquest brought substantial transformations to the Carpetani urban settlements, including the social division between slaves and freemen, the monetary economy, the fostering of manufacture and trade or the new Roman acculturation. The territory of the current region was mining-rich in Antiquity, with mentions in classical sources to the mining of cinnabar from , silver, gold and other minerals such as selenite from Segobriga and the laminitana sharpening stone. Middle Ages history Built from scratch on state initiative, the founding of the city of Reccopolis by Visigoths in the late 6th century was a singular development in the context of the European Early Middle Ages. Following the 8th century Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula, just after the 741 Berber Revolt, the so-called Middle March of Al-Andalus (al-Ťāğr al-Awsat) was created as territorial sub-division, existing for the rest of the ensuing emiral and caliphal period of Al-Andalus. During this era, the Middle March had eminently a military nature, both shielding the core of Al-Andalus from the raids of the Northern Christian polities as well as serving as staging ground for Muslim offensive campaigns against the former. Berber clans such as the Masmuda Banu-Salim (linked to the