Late Mesolithic burials at Casa Corona (Villena, Spain): direct radiocarbon and palaeodietary evidence of the last forager populations in Eastern Iberia (original) (raw)

"New data and a review of historiographic information from Neolithic sites of the Malaga and Algarve coasts (southern Iberian Peninsula) and from the Maghreb (North Africa) reveal the existence of a Neolithic settlement at least from 7.5 cal ka BP. The agricultural and pastoralist food producing economy of that population rapidly replaced the coastal economies of the Mesolithic populations. The timing of this population and economic turnover coincided withmajor changes in the continental and marine ecosystems, including upwelling intensity, sea-level changes and increased aridity in the Sahara and along the Iberian coast. These changes likely impacted the subsistence strategies of the Mesolithic populations along the Iberian seascapes and resulted in abandonments manifested as sedimentary hiatuses in some areas during the Mesolithic–Neolithic transition. The rapid expansion and area of dispersal of the early Neolithic traits suggest the use of marine technology. Different evidences for a Maghrebian origin for the first colonists have been summarized. The recognition of an early North-African Neolithic influence in Southern Iberia and the Maghreb is vital for understanding the appearance and development of the Neolithic in Western Europe. Our review suggests links between climate change, resource allocation, and population turnover."

Thanks to investigations in northern Iberia during the last two decades, it is now possible to establish models for the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition (5th millennium cal BC). This requires a critical evaluation of the archaeological evidence, and agreement on which criteria allow discrimination between context with evidence of hunter-gatherer groups and those corresponding to Neolithic groups. In northern Spain a traditional criteria based on technology was used to identify the new way of life until the 1990s. Currently, well-established but scant data about farming and stockbreeding is available, and a consensus exists about the importance that should be given to the introduction of artificial techniques in food production. However, this criterion can be difficult to apply and the cultural attribution (Mesolithic vs. Neolithic) of distinct contexts is complex. After a consideration of these difficulties, this paper presents a model for the transition to the Neolithic based on the statistical treatment of the radiocarbon dataset. In order to analyse the Neolithisation process from the chronological point of view, published dates for the period of time covering the process have been compiled ca. 9500-2500 cal BC. Bayesian statistical models have been constructed to investigate the transitional process and assess the value of radiocarbon dates in understanding this period. Using published dates, the chronological models show an overlap between the final Mesolithic and the Early Neolithic archaeological deposits. The final hunter gatherer societies appear to have disappeared after the Neolithic groups were present in the region. This result is in accordance with the complexity displayed by the Early Neolithic in archaeological terms. Results support the hypothesis of a “mosaic” Neolithisation process, with groups of hunters and farmers living together in the region during the first half of the fifth millennium, at least in the eastern part of Cantabrian Spain.

This paper explores how Early Holocene climate changes in the Western Mediterranean would have affected Late Mesolithic settlement distribution and subsistence strategies in Iberian Peninsula, thereby giving rise to various adaptive scenarios. The current radiocarbon data set concerning the Neolithisation process has revealed the rapidity of the spread of farming in Iberia. Considering both the implications of the last hunter-gatherers’ adaptation strategies and the population dynamics of agro-pastoral communities, we address the migration patterns underlying the Mesolithic- Neolithic transition. In conclusion, we propose that the initial colonization process was the result of two successive and spatially heterogeneous migrations: Maritime Pioneer Colonization and targeted migration to places favorable to the new economic system.

Stable isotope investigations of the Prehistory of the Western Mediterranean have increased exponentially during the last decade. This region has a high number of Mesolithic and Neolithic carbon and nitrogen isotope ratio data available compared with other world areas, resulting from the interest in the " transition " between hunter-gathering and farming. This type of analysis is important as one of the few tools that give direct information on the poorly understood dietary transition from hunter-gatherer to agro-pastoralist subsistence in the Mediterranean Basin. Carbon and nitrogen stable isotope analysis on bulk collagen are especially useful for exploring marine vs. terrestrial protein input and therefore assess marine resource exploitation by these two different lifestyles. Gathering together all isotopic data for these chronologies we show that the Western Mediterranean underwent a unique/distinct Neolithisation process. These data show a gradual dietary shift in aquatic resource consumption during the transition to farming that contrasts to elsewhere in Europe.

The emergence of Neolithic societies was transformative, impacting many aspects of life, particularly diet. The process of Neolithization in Iberia is increasingly understood as the arrival of new people from the Central Mediterranean, who dispersed along the Iberian coasts introducing cereal production, herding, and Cardial pottery and associated material culture. Although research has clarified aspects of the cultigen-dominated economy of these new people, questions remain due to the limitations of conventional archaeobotanical and archaeozoological methods that tend to produce indirect evidence. The extent to which these early farmers adopted Mesolithic staples, which are often difficult to detect with other methods, remains unclear. Furthermore, questions surround the nature of methods of food preparation Cardial Neolithic people used when incorporating grains into their diet. In this study, we examined direct evidence of the diet from the Iberian Cardial Neolithic site of Cova Bonica (Vallirana, Baix Llobregat, Catalonia) using CN stable isotopes on bone and plant microremains trapped in dental calculus from six human individuals and associated fauna. Isotopes show a diet based on terrestrial C3 resources, with no isotopic evidence of aquatic or C4 resource consumption. Plant microremains (starches and phytoliths) provide evidence of cereal use, as well as of other plant foods. However, perhaps due to Bonica’s early farmers’ choice of grain variety, their grain processing methods, or due to specific dental calculus formation factors, the grain assemblages are rather limited and provide scarce information on food preparation.

In this paper, we present a method to analyze lithic assemblages that can yield detailed information about Paleolithic technological organization patterns and land-use strategies. Applying it to series of Late Pleistocene assemblages from sites distributed along the northern Mediterranean (i.e., Gibraltar, eastern Spain and southeastern Italy) and spanning the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition, we show how this approach can be used to track diachronic behavioral change for Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. We demonstrate that the approach has wide applicability, that it can be used to reconstruct prehistoric land-use practices provided sedimentation rates can be accounted for, and that it provides a better explanation for diachronic lithic variability than schemes that simply classify assemblages in poorly defined “archaic” to “evolved” sequences. This analysis strongly suggests that no marked shift in the flexibility of technological organization or land-use strategies coincides with the Middle–Upper Paleolithic Transition. The implications of these findings and the apparent disjunction of behavioral and biological change known to have taken place during that interval lead us to outline new kinds of research questions which may better enable researchers to comprehend the mechanisms of the Transition process.