El Miron Cave: A long cultural sequence for the late upper Pleistocene & Holocene in the Cantabrian Cordillera of Northern Spain
Lawrence Straus - University of New Mexico
Abstract: Excavations in El Miron Cave, co-directed since 1996 by L.G.Straus & M.R.Gonzalez Morales, have revealed a very long culture-stratigraphic sequence radiocarbon dated by over 60 assays between 41,000 and 3000 years ago. Excavated strata pertain to the late Mousterian, initial Upper Paleolithic, Solutrean, Lower, Middle and Upper Magdalenian, Azilian, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic & Bronze Age periods. Among the most important findings so far are extraordinarily rich residential deposits of early Magdalenian age with spectacular works of art and ornaments, simple structures, abundant evidence of subsistence based on ibex and red deer hunting and salmon fishing, as well as indications of changing catchment territories based on lithic raw material sourcing.
Rock art discoveries in El Miron are stratigraphically also dated to this period. El Miron has also yielded the oldest and most complete evidence of the origins of Neolithic adaptations in northern Atlantic Spain, with wheat, domesticated ovicaprines and ceramics at c. 5700 RCYPB. The topmost levels (Chalcolithic and Bronze Age) provide some of the first residential (i.e., non-funerary) evidence from a modern cave excavation in the region, including indications of storage, stabling, metallurgy, and other evidence of complex social and technological developments.
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