Abstract
This paper compares current evidence for Mesolithic adaptations along the north Spanish coast from Galicia in the west to the Basque Country in the east. Significant questions and issues pertinent to Mesolithic research are reviewed, followed by a brief discussion of advances in method and theory over the past 25 years. Cantabria, País Vasco, and Galicia are compared with each other and en bloc with evidence from the middle Ebro over the 12-6 ka BP interval considered to bracket the transition between foraging and domestication economies. Marked differences in the time-space grid, geology, and the resolution of the data hinder these comparisons. A radiocarbon database totaling 610 dates is compiled, cleaned, filtered and analyzed for each region individually using summed calibrated date probability distribution (SPD) curves as a proxy for population density fluctuations over time. Regional curves are then compared with each other and with a global model.
Highlights
The Mesolithic is a concept that has a long history in archaeological research
Informed by various more or less explicit, mostly ecological, conceptual frameworks, and despite the inevitably uneven resolution of the time-space grid, recent work in northern Spain largely succeeds in shedding a long-standing adherence to culture history that has limited understanding of the
The Mesolithic has an internal dynamic all its own, many workers feel obligated to come to grips with the nature of the transition to the Neolithic because of its transcendental importance in the economic history of our species, and because of the long-standing notion that farming and foraging are fundamentally incompatible economic strategies that compete with one another for land, time, manpower, and other resources
Summary
Submitted on 29 February 2020 | Accepted on 23 July 2020 | Published on 17 January 2022 urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:5CB5F509-563B-4E30-82CB-0DBB52CC9DD1. KEY WORDS Spain, Mesolithic, Atlantic façade, paleodemography, mobility, SPD analysis. — The Mesolithic of Atlantic Coastal Spain – a comparison with the Middle Ebro Basin, in Rodríguez-Álvarez X. P., Otte M., Lombera-Hermida A. de & Fábregas-Valcarce R. (eds), Palaeolithic of Northwest Iberia and beyond: multidisciplinary approaches to the analysis of Late Quaternary hunter-gatherer societies.
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