Abstract
In 2014, an anthropic accumulation of chert material was discovered in La Guinardera area, at the southwest of the Sant Martí de Tous town (Barcelona, NE Iberian Peninsula). In 2018 a first archaeological intervention was carried out in two locations: La Guinardera and La Guinardera Nord. After the fieldworks, these two accumulations were interpreted as chert workshops. These workshops are in the St. Genís Formation, included within La Noguera lacustrine system and dated to the Priabonian age (upper Eocene). The St. Martí de Tous area presents shallow lacustrine conditions typical of sabkha environments, in which layers of gypsums and sandy lutites are interspersed with tabular red sandstone levels, yielding different varieties of chert.
 The Guinardera chert is characterized by a fairly homogeneous matrix, presenting a fine texture, with a microcrystalline and spherulitic length-slow chalcedony matrix, and a combination of grey colours, in general of dark hues, with an opaque diaphaneity but translucent at the edges.
 The archaeological assemblage from La Guinardera Nord site allows us to identify a chert workshop for the production of gunflints. The heterogeneity of the assemblage at La Guinardera site precludes assigning it to any single chrono-cultural period or function.
 The technological characterization of La Guinardera Nord site reveals distinctive attributes of a gunflint workshop that can be differentiated from prehistoric workshops. The presence of square and thick preforms, oxide traces on butts and ventral faces, marked bulbs and thick platforms, together with fresh edges on flakes and blades and the near-absence of patinated materials, corroborate it.
 The presence of these two deposits within the above-mentioned formation shows us a repeated landscape exploitation pattern for raw material extraction, since references chert use range from the Middle Palaeolithic (e.g., Abric Romaní) to historical times (e.g., La Guinardera Nord).
Highlights
Lithics represent some of the most important archaeological evidence for demarcating an exploited territory
This article presents two new archaeological sites discovered on the eastern margin of the Ebro Basin (NE Iberian Peninsula) notable for the extraction of chert as a raw material: La Guinardera (LG), of uncertain chronological attribution due to its exploitation through multiple periods; and La Guinardera Nord (LGN), a location used for the exploitation of chert for gunflints in modern times
Due to the heterogeneity of the assemblage and the difficulties associated with the chronological attribution of La Guinardera site, this work will focus on the homogeneous assemblage of La Guinardera Nord
Summary
Lithics represent some of the most important archaeological evidence for demarcating an exploited territory. From prehistory to modern times, lithics, and flint and chert, have been exploited and used for different purposes in western Europe. As Emy (1978) rightly pointed out, its exploitation for military and civil (gunflints), agricultural (threshing inserts) and domestic (lighters fire-flints) purposes was of great importance, with the onset of the so-called “second golden age of flint”. This article presents two new archaeological sites discovered on the eastern margin of the Ebro Basin (NE Iberian Peninsula) notable for the extraction of chert as a raw material: La Guinardera (LG), of uncertain chronological attribution due to its exploitation through multiple periods; and La Guinardera Nord (LGN), a location used for the exploitation of chert for gunflints in modern times. The presence of chert outcrops and extraction quarries within a concentrated area makes it possible to study the evolution of territorial exploitation practices from Palaeolithic huntergatherers (e.g., Abric Romaní) (Gómez de Soler 2016: Chapter 7, 8 & 9; Gómez de Soler et al 2019; 2020a; 2020b), through the Neolithic period (e.g., Vilars de Tous) (Cámara 2017; Clop 2005), to modern times
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