Radiocarbon Dating the Late Upper Paleolithic of Cantabrian Spain: El Mirón Cave Date List IV

Lawrence Guy Straus,Michael Richards,Sahra Talamo,Manuel R González Morales,Thomas Higham

doi:10.2458/azu_rc.57.18109

Abstract

This fourth date list for the long cultural sequence in El Mirón Cave (Cantabria, Spain) reports on 19 new AMS assays for Solutrean, Initial, Lower, and Middle Magdalenian and Azilian levels, ranging from about 19 to 11 uncalibrated kyr. Key results are provision of further precision on the transition between the Solutrean and Magdalenian at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the very exact dating of a Magdalenian human burial and its relationship to both major living floors and closely associated rock art in the cave.

Highlights

One of the objectives of the El Mirón Cave Prehistoric Project since it inception in 1996 has been to date a long series of human occupations in a manner independent of supposedly temporally diagnostic artifacts
Key results are provision of further precision on the transition between the Solutrean and Magdalenian at the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the very exact dating of a Magdalenian human burial and its relationship to both major living floors and closely associated rock art in the cave
El Mirón Cave is located at 260 m asl and is surrounded by ≥1000-m summits in the Cantabrian Cordillera in eastern Cantabria Province, some 20 km from the Holocene shore of the Bay of Biscay, equidistant between the cities of Santander and Bilbao (Vizcaya)

Summary

INTRODUCTION

One of the objectives of the El Mirón Cave Prehistoric Project since it inception in 1996 has been to date a long series of human occupations in a manner independent of supposedly temporally diagnostic artifacts. The El Mirón burial is the first Magdalenian interment to be discovered on the Iberian Peninsula, (in line with Magdalenian traditions in France and Germany, as summarized by Pettitt [2011]) there is other evidence in Spain of the postmortem manipulation of human remains, including the cranial “cups” found by Obermaier (1924) in the Lower Magdalenian horizon of nearby El Castillo Cave in 1911. This burial proved to be pene-contemporaneous with major Lower Magdalenian Level 17 and with the decoration of a large block that had fallen from the cave ceiling shortly before. Dating the Solutrean, Initial, and Lower Magdalenian levels in the site, supplementing (and perhaps modifying) what was already known and providing a radiometric age for the burial and dates for the stratigraphically bracketing levels

THE NEW DATES

Square Level Spit