An oval space of about 5 square meters, with 4,600 objects or remains, including deer, horse, and bison bones; needles, shells and decorated bones, that is, the jewels of the time. A space inside the lavish La Garma cave, in Cantabria. A small area delimited by an alignment of stone blocks and stalagmites and covered by braided sticks and skins leaning against the cave wall, and with a bonfire in the center. This is the “mini-floor” of the Paleolithic discovered by a team from the International Institute of Prehistoric Research of Cantabria (IIIPC), which this Thursday presents the results of the research at the National Museum of Archaeology. This has been possible after being awarded the National Prize for Archeology and Paleontology in 2021, awarded by the Palarq Foundation.
The house is organized around a small bonfire. Hundreds of objects have appeared around it that reveal the daily life of a family from the Magdalenian era, no more and no less than 16,800 years ago. It is one of the best preserved homes in the world from that period. The remains denote their food system, with remains of hunting and gathering.
Exactly 4,614 objects have been documented in the small space. There are bones from various animals that were part of their diet, such as deer, horses and bison. Some 600 pieces of flint, assegais (small wooden weapons tipped with deer antlers, possibly with stabilizing feathers on the back, which were thrown by hand or using a propeller), needles and a proto-harpoon have also appeared; There are also shells of marine mollusks and remains of fauna and instruments linked to subsistence (something like the remains of the kitchen), decorated bones, such as a spectacular perforated phalanx, of an aurochs (a type of bovid whose last reference dates back to the XVII) in which an engraved representation of one of them and also of a human face is exhibited: it is a unique piece in the European Paleolithic. The safe also appears: several pendants that the residents of the house wore as decorations.
The work attempted to apply criteria of minimal invasion or alteration of the archaeological site, with the realization of a true continuous gigaortoma of the soils, a high-resolution 3D cartography of the magnetic field, the molecular and genetic analysis of soils and Paleolithic objects, the determination of faunal remains from bone collagen mass spectrometry (ZooMS) or hyperspectral image analysis.
Within the project, it is planned to recreate an identical structure in the Rock Art Center that the Government of Cantabria has created in the town of Puente Viesgo, near La Garma.
This research has been carried out for two years, although La Garma has been known for decades and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.
The works presented today have been directed by the professor at the University of Cantabria Pablo Arias and the director of the Museum of Prehistory and Archeology of Cantabria (Mupac) Roberto Ontañón.
In addition to the house now analyzed, La Garma contains a fabulous set of Paleolithic rock art and one of the most complete stratigraphic sequences in Europe, with a chronology of life over the last 400,000 years. It houses sepulchral contexts from the Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age, the Visigoth period and a fort also from the Iron Age. Research at the site is funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, through the PrehMIND Project, a program on the development of symbolic thinking of Paleolithic populations that is directed by Professor Pablo Arias.
The IIIPC team that has carried out the current work is made up of archaeologists Rodrigo Portero Hernández and Carlos García-Noriega Villa, who have carried out all the work of cataloging and determining the remains inside the cabin, Jorge Vallejo, Patricia Fernández Sánchez and Alba Ruiz Cabanzón. There has also been the collaboration of researchers François Lévêque (from the University of La Rochelle), Alexandre Lucquin (University of York), Ron Pinhasi, José Miguel Tejero, Pere Gelabert and Katerina Douka (University of Vienna), Jaime Lira ( CNRS-University of Toulouse), Esteban Álvarez (University of Salamanca), Christopher Bronk Ramsey (University of Oxford), Débora Zurro and Juan José García-Granero (Higher Council for Scientific Research), from the technicians of the company Gim Geomatics Vicente Bayarri and Jesús Herrera and the MUPAC restaurateur Eva María Pereda.
