The emergence of mesolithic cemeteries in SW Europe: insights from the El Collado (Oliva, Valencia, Spain) radiocarbon record.

Juan F Gibaja,F Javier Santos,Florence Allièse,Xavier Terradas,M Eulàlia Subirà,Lidia Agulló,Isabel Gómez-Martínez,Javier Fernández-López De Pablo,Gary W Crawford

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115505

Abstract

Located on the Iberian Mediterranean coast, El Collado is an open-air site where a rescue excavation was conducted over two seasons in 1987 and 1988. The archaeological work excavated a surface area of 143m2 where 14 burials were discovered, providing skeletal remains from 15 individuals. We have obtained AMS dates for 10 of the 15 individuals by means of the direct dating of human bones. The ranges of the probability distribution of the calibrated dates suggest that the cemetery was used during a long period of time (781–1020 years at a probability of 95.4%). The new dates consequently set back the chrono-cultural attribution of the cemetery from the initial proposal of Late Mesolithic to an older date in the Early Mesolithic. Therefore, El Collado becomes the oldest known cemetery in the Iberian Peninsula, earlier than the numerous Mesolithic funerary contexts documented on the Atlantic façade such as the Portuguese shell-middens in the Muge and Sado Estuaries or the funerary sites on the northern Iberian coast.

Highlights

In Europe, the recurrent use of specific spaces for a funerary use is attested with the last huntergatherer populations
In order to narrow the chronological ranges of Burials 11 and 9, and to constrain them to a more realistic dietary estimation, we decided to compute for both samples the mean percentage of marine diet reported for all the individuals analysed at El Collado
The body of AMS radiocarbon dates presented in this work sheds new light on the chronology of funerary practices and the emergence of cemeteries in south-western Europe

Summary

Introduction

In Europe, the recurrent use of specific spaces for a funerary use is attested with the last huntergatherer populations. These communities experienced significant changes in terms of diet diversification, patterns of residential mobility and demographic behaviour [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. A cemetery is defined as a particular place, recognizable and recognized by a social group, where all or part of its community is buried over a period of time.

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