Book description
Though known as a site since 1903, El Mirón Cave in the Cantabrian
Mountains of northern Spain remained unexcavated until a team from the
universities of New Mexico and Cantabria began ongoing excavations in
1996. This large, deeply stratified cave allowed the team to apply
cutting-edge techniques of excavation, recording, and
multidisciplinary analysis in the meticulous study of a site that has
become a new reference sequence for the classic Cantabrian region. The
excavations uncovered the long history of human occupation of the
cave, extending from the end of the Middle Paleolithic, through the
Upper Paleolithic, up to the modern era. This volume comprehensively
describes the background information on the setting, the site, the
chronology, and the sedimentology. It then focuses on the biological
and archaeological records of the Holocene levels pertaining to
Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Bronze Age.
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians will be drawn to
this study and its extensive findings, dated by some seventy-five
radiocarbon assays.
Lawrence Guy Straus is Leslie Spier
Distinguished Professor of anthropology and editor of the Journal
of Anthropological Research at the University of New Mexico.
Manuel R. González Morales is professor of
prehistory and director of the Institute of Prehistoric Research at
the Universidad de Cantabria in Santander, Spain.
