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The Winter Solstice at La Nariz WINTER SOLSTICE AT THE IBERIAN CAVE- SANCTUARY OF LA NARIZ
We presentresults of an archaeoastronomical study of the Iberian cave-sanctuary of La Nariz (Moratalla, Murcia, Spain). The chronology of the site has been established between the third century BCE to the first century CE, however, there are material evidences of its use from the Late Bronze Age. The cave has a striking symmetrical morphology, with two main almost parallel long cavities of similar sizes and proportions. Both cavities have water springs, and carved basins to collect water at their innermost areas. We have found that the northerly cavity is facing the point of the horizon where the winter solstice sunset takes place, producing an striking illumination phenomenon onto the carved basin. On the other hand, the southerly cavity is slightly tilted to the south with respect to the northerly one, facing the moonset at the major southern lunastice or Venus at its southernmost setting.
Archaeoastronomy in Bronze Age Sites of La Mancha (Spain)
Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, 2016
We present archaeoastronomical results of an interdisciplinary project to study Bronze Age sites of the so-called Cultura de las Motillas in the Spanish region of La Mancha. We find that winter solstice sunrise was of special importance in the funerary and perhaps religious practises of these peoples. The impressive megalithic monumental complex of Castillejo del Bonete shows a remarkable marker of the winter solstice sunrise on the most peculiar mountain of its horizon as well as alignments with this and other singular solar events as equinox and summer solstice. There seems to be a correspondence between the orientations of some of the main architectural structures of the monument and the general arrangement of two of the main galleries of a natural cave that lies just beneath it. Markers and orientations to the winter solstice sunrise seem to be present in other nearby contemporary sites such as the necropolis of Cerro Ortega and the motilla of El Azuer. Castillejo del Bonete stands as the first evidence of a clear solar marker in a megalithic site of the Iberian Peninsula, indicating that the precise location of the monument was carefully chosen. The alignments defined by several of its structures further reinforce its astronomical symbolism.
First Data from the Prehistoric Site Complex of Cueva del Arco (Murcia, Spain)
The southern Iberian Peninsula is a key area for understanding the timing and patterns of the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition. Recently, the excavation and study of new sites have provided new insights on this topic. The aim of this paper is to introduce Cueva del Arco, a site complex featuring distinct caves and rock shelters. Cueva del Arco is located at a short distance from the Almadenes gorge (Cieza, Spain) and preserves both Middle and Upper Palaeolithic deposits and assemblages, as well as rock art. Despite being known since the 1990s for its Palaeolithic rock art, systematic fieldwork was never undertaken at the site until recently. We here report the first results of a research programme that includes the systematic excavation of several cavities belonging to the Cueva del Arco complex, focusing on the location and context of the site, its stratigraphy and chronology, and site formation. Research at the site is still ongoing, but preliminary results suggest that the data from Cueva del Arco will provide new clues to the current debate on the transition from Neanderthals to anatomically modern humans in southern Europe.
Pre-Solutrean rock art in southernmost Europe: Evidence from Las Ventanas Cave (Andalusia, Spain
PLoS ONE 13(10):e0204651, 2018
The south of Iberia conserves an important group of Palaeolithic rock art sites. The graph-isms have been mostly attributed to the Solutrean and Magdalenian periods, while the possibility that older remains exist has provoked extensive debate. This circumstance has been linked to both the cited periods, until recently, due to the transition from the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic in the extreme southwest of Europe as well as the non-existence of some of the early periods of Palaeolithic art documented in northern Iberia. This study presents the results of interdisciplinary research conducted in Las Ventanas Cave. These results enabled us to identify a new Palaeolithic rock art site. The technical, stylistic and temporal traits point to certain similarities with the range of exterior deep engravings in Cantabrian Palaeolithic rock art. Ventanas appears to corroborate the age attributed to those kinds of graphic expression and points to the early arrival of the Upper Palaeolithic in the south of Iberia. Importantly, the results provide information on the pre-Solutrean date attributed to trilinear hind figures. These findings challenge the supposed Neanderthal survival idea at one of the main late Middle Palaeolithic southern Iberian sites (Carigu Èela) and, due to the parallels between them and an engraving attributed to this period in Gibraltar, it raises the possibility of interaction between modern humans and Neanderthals in the extreme southwest of Europe.
La Güelga Cave (Northern Iberia): An archaeological sequence from the late Upper Pleistocene
57th Annual Meeting in Heidenheim Hugo Obermaier-Gesellschaft für Erforschung des Eiszeitalters und der Steinzeit e.V., 2015
The cave of La Güelga (Asturias, Northern Spain) is located in the eastern region of the Asturian Massif within the carboniferous limestone of the Calizas de Montaña. A small river runs through the cave that has shaped by erosion chambers and terraces at the cave entrance. They form a large rock shelter. In one terrace (D Area), an Upper Pleistocene deposit containing archaeological and palaeontological remains from the Middle-Upper Palaeolithic transition has been excavated. In the lower part (Area A) of the rock shelter a Magdalenian deposit has been excavated. Close to this in Area C Magdalenian and Solutrean layers are superposed. The poster presents results of the archaeological research in La Güelga cave, carried out between 1989 and 2012. They comprise interesting data (faunal, lithics and mobile art) of the late hunter-gatherer groups in northern Spain and important d
The Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in La Güelga cave (Asturias, Northern Spain)
La Güelga cave is located at the bottom of a mountain valley in the Eastern part of Asturias (Northern Spain), 186 m above sea level and 15 km far away from the coast. It currently comprises a group of caves that were occupied during the Middle and Upper Paleolithic periods (MP and UP respectively). In recent years, we have studied the levels of La Güelga cave –D Zone-proposing a sequence for the MP/UP transition: Mousterian-Aurignacian-Châtelperronian, which we review in this paper after a detailed analysis of the chronostratigraphy. We also provide new radiocarbon dates for the Mousterian, Aurignacian and Châtelperronian levels. Finally, the geoarchaeology, taphonomy, archaeological data, and chronology suggest that the interstratification -initially identified on the basis of stratigraphic observations during excavation-cannot be maintained. In any case, the stratigraphy of the internal D Zone of La Güelga cave is one of the most interesting from the Cantabrian region for analyzing the last phases of the Mousterian and the rise of the Aurignacian in the North of the Peninsula.
El bien incluido en la Lista de Patrimonio Mundial está formado por dieciocho sitios: Altami-ra, en la lista desde 1985, y diecisiete cuevas inscritas en 2008 como una extensión del bien original. Estos lugares constituyen uno de los más importantes conjuntos con arte paleolítico del mundo. Localizado en cuevas, desde la entrada a las partes más profundas de estas formaciones kársticas, despliegan todos los elementos necesarios para garantizar la autenti-cidad y la integridad del bien: la investigación realizada desde el último tercio del s. XIX ha do-cumentado una amplia variedad de las representaciones, técnicas y temas que caracterizan a este fenómeno, cuya cronología abarca unos 30.000 años. Otra característica destacable del arte paleolítico cantábrico es el buen estado de conservación de las manifestaciones parietales. Preservadas durante milenios en el medio ambiente protegido de las cuevas pro-fundas, es nuestra obligación conservarlas para las generaciones futuras. En consecuencia, las autoridades responsables de los sitios desarrollan una serie de medidas administrativas y protectoras que tratan de eliminar o, al menos, disminuir los riesgos de deterioro. Esto puede variar en cierto grado dependiendo de un factor importante: la apertura de las cuevas al pú-blico, lo que hace su gestión más compleja. The World Heritage property is formed by eighteen sites: Altamira, on the List since 1985, and seventeen caves inscribed in 2008 as an extension of the original property. These sites constitute one of the most important ensembles of Palaeolithic art in the World. Located in caves, from the entrances to the deepest parts of these karst formations, it displays all the necessary elements to guarantee the authenticity and the integrity of the property: research carried out since the last third of the nineteenth century has documented a wide variety of the representations, techniques and themes that characterise this phenomenon , whose chronology spans about 30 Ky. Another remarkable feature of Cantabrian Cave Art is the good state of conservation of the parietal manifestations. Preserved in the protected environment of the deep caves for millennia, it is our obligation to conserve it for future generations. Accordingly, the authorities responsible for the sites deploy a range of administrative and curative measures which try to eliminate or, at least, diminish the risks of deterioration. These vary to some extent depending on an important factor: the opening of the caves to the public, which makes their management more complex.
El Pedroso - a prehistoric cave sanctuary in Castille
Background to the project The excavation described in this paper formed part of a larger project investigating the character of Schematic Art in northwest Iberia and comparing it with Galician rock art. The work was mainly concerned with the locations of a series of decorated panels on either side of the border between Portugal and Spain and suggested that the sites with Schematic Art were usually less accessible than those with the other style of petroglyphs (Bradley and Fábregas, 1999; Bradley, 2002). They may have played a more specialised role during the Copper Age and Early Bronze Age.
Quaternary International, 2020
The Atlantic Western Pyrenean area is exceptionally rich in archaeological evidence of funerary contexts dated to Late Prehistory. These funerary deposits are mainly recorded in caves and megalithic structures. Burials attributed to the Holocene have been recorded in more than 187 caves (177 just in Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia), reflecting the relevance of this phenomenon in the AWP. Nonetheless, just a few of these inhumation contexts have been properly studied, and even fewer have direct and systematic 14 C dates. Here, we present the results from the analysis of two sepulchral caves from Biscay: Atxuri-I and Txotxinkoba, that preserve a minimum number of 9 and 14 individuals, respectively. Both caves present subadult individuals of different ages-at-death and among adults, both sexes are represented. Although the representation of osteological elements is roughly similar in both sites, small differences in the preservation of pelvic bones and the completeness of long bones suggest a potential bias in Atxuri-I. We provide six new radiocarbon dates on human remains. Two 14 C dates from Atxuri-I show that the cave was used for funerary purposes at least during two very different times: the Mesolithic and the Bronze Age. The latter period is represented by a directly dated complete femur, which was also studied biomechanically, providing results similar with the available Bronze Age female sample from the Iberian Peninsula. The four dates from Txotxinkoba show that the cave was only used for a relatively short period during the Chalcolithic. When put within the Atlantic Western Pyrenean context, despite the limited amount of direct dates a pattern is evident, where most of the largest accumulations of human remains are found in sites with Chalcolithic burials (between 4,600 and 4,000 BP), such as Lacilla II, Pico Ramos, Urtao II and Abauntz, and Txotxinkoba would fit within this group. Those caves that show human burial chronologies spanning longer periods of time, such as Lumentxa, Santimamiñe, Marizulo or Aizpea, generally contain smaller numbers of individuals, and Atxuri-I would fit within this group.