El Mirón Cave, Cantabrian Spain

Download or read book El Mirón Cave, Cantabrian Spain written by Lawrence Guy Straus and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2012-04-16 with total page 784 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though known as a site since 1903, El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian Mountains of northern Spain remained unexcavated until a team from the universities of New Mexico and Cantabria began ongoing excavations in 1996. This large, deeply stratified cave allowed the team to apply cutting-edge techniques of excavation, recording, and multidisciplinary analysis in the meticulous study of a site that has become a new reference sequence for the classic Cantabrian region. The excavations uncovered the long history of human occupation of the cave, extending from the end of the Middle Paleolithic, through the Upper Paleolithic, up to the modern era. This volume comprehensively describes the background information on the setting, the site, the chronology, and the sedimentology. It then focuses on the biological and archaeological records of the Holocene levels pertaining to Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age. Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians will be drawn to this study and its extensive findings, dated by some seventy-five radiocarbon assays.