Human ecodynamics in the Late Upper Pleistocene of Northern Spain : an archeozoological study of ungulate remains from the Lower Magdalenian and other periods in El Mirón Cave (Cantabria)
- Autores: Jeanne Marie Geiling
- Directores de la Tesis: Ana Belén Marín Arroyo (dir. tes.), Manuel R. González Morales (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universidad de Cantabria ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: inglés
- Títulos paralelos:
- La ecodinámica humana durante el Pleistoceno Superior tardío en el Norte de España
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Lawrence Guy Straus (presid.), Igor Gutiérrez Zugasti (secret.), Ruth Blasco López (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Arqueología Prehistórica por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona y la Universidad de Cantabria
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: UCrea
- Resumen
Humans were mobile hunter-gatherers for more than two million years before the Neolithic Revolution, when agriculture and pastoralism led to sedentism. However, significant changes in human behavior and economic systems were accumulating long before. The mobile foraging lifeway developed for thousands of years, so why was it abruptly replaced among most human societies? One possibility is that impactful climate changes during the late Upper Pleistocene (Marine Isotope Stages 3 and 2) drastically reduced environmental viability in many human ecosystems, which were of lesser extent in refugia areas of relatively higher resources diversity. During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 23,000-19,000 years ago, climate impacted human populations sustained in refugia in southern European regions. Economic adaptations maintained the efficient extraction of resources by primary intensification, but followed by complex diversification processes accumulating with the post-LGM climate improvement and re-expansion from such refuge areas to central and northern Europe.
In this dissertation, changes in human economic strategies and their relationship to climate, demography, and social factors are evaluated based on a throughout archeozoological analysis of the macro-mammal assemblages from late Middle and early Upper Paleolithic, Solutrean, Initial and especially Lower Magdalenian levels of El Mirón Cave (Ramales de la Victoria, Cantabria, Spain) dating between circa 48,000, and 14,500 uncal. BP. Dominated by the ungulates red deer and Spanish ibex, the more than 200,000 faunal remains analyzed with classic and latest methods allow studying the foraging economic behavior in its contexts. This investigation emphasizes the local environmental conditions (by stable isotopes on ungulate teeth, phytoliths in ungulate dental calculus and chemical bone surface staining) and resource exploitation strategies (by archeozoological and taphonomic means to reveal diet breadth and butchering processes) through time and space. Further taphonomic-spatial studies provide the specific sequences of chaînes opératoires of animal exploitation, demonstrating multifaceted alterations of economic components by the inhabitants of the El Mirón Cave.
The El Mirón results combined with a meta-analysis of published late Middle and Upper Paleolithic (mainly the Magdalenian period) faunal studies from the Cantabrian region identify moments of dietary economic stress on these human-groups from a broader perspective. The overall results show that humans coped with resource instability through changes in annual mobility during unstable climate conditions. Notably, those dominant large-game species subsistence strategies mainly increased the use of lower-ranked resources related to possible population growth and dietary stress. Economic adjustments were crucial to encounter the fluctuating distribution of food resources, diversity, and accessibility of the local environment, but varied according to demography and social dynamics. In particular, Cantabrian Lower Magdalenian groups intensified resource exploitation strategies during the harshest, but relatively stable climatic conditions, which is associated with complex (longer) site occupations. The dissertation provides a substantial corpus of detailed archeozoological data from one of the most important Stone Age sites, excavated with modern methods, in this region in recent decades. The work demonstrates how such well-dated, high-resolution insights of site use combined with structured collections of published faunal data improve human behavior analysis and understanding of the dynamics in prehistorical economic behaviors.
