The geoarchaelogical research on the Late Pleistocene Mousterian occupation deposits of the Abric Romaní rock shelter (Capellades Barcelona, Spain)

Abstract

Changes in the focus of such research in conjunction with scientific advances have diversified the relationship between Earth sciences, Archaeology and History. Today, the core concept of geoarchaeology focuses on the study of anthropic sediments recovered from archaeological sites and landscapes. The potential results that anthropic sediments can offer were highlighted in the last third of the 20th century. Currently, the study of anthropic sediments is a dynamic field within archaeological research focusing on multi-scale analyses such as I try to present in this paper. Here, I give a sedimentary description of the living floors using sediments associated with the use of fire in the archaeological bed north of the Abric Romaní rock-shelter site. The data are the lithological descriptions of the combustion structures taken from the field record and thin section samples. The objective is to provide observations to demonstrate the physical reality of the living floors in the sedimentary record of archaeological sites and landscapes. My main conclusion highlights the importance of knowledge about historic and prehistoric human settlements in order to guide the field record and sampling of these rare sedimentary records. The aim of the research on the Romaní rock shelter is to report on the paleoecology and the autoecology of the archaic human groups through the archaeological record.