Arturo De Lombera-Hermida

University of Santiago de Compostela | USC · Department of History

The management of a UNESCO Global Geopark (UGGp) requires a vast wealth of miscellaneous scientific knowledge that can be successfully organised using a Geographical Information System (GIS). This paper presents a pragmatic GIS database to assist in the suitable governance of the Courel Mountains UGGp (2017) in Northwest Spain. The database is stru...

The Aïn Beni Mathar – Guefaït (ABM-GFT) region in Eastern Morocco is the object of anarchaeological, palaeontological, geological and geochronological research project, led by an interna-tional team since 2006. The research in this former fluvio-lacustrine basin, roughly 2000 km2, hasrevealed a significant number of Pleistocene and Holocene sites....

In this paper, we deal with the locational analysis of the Cova Eirós site (Triacastela, Lugo), occupied from the Middle Palaeolithic to the present. From GIS and statistics, we intend to approach those environmental factors that define its importance as a place of occupation over time and on a recurring basis. Once we have analysed the variables t...

Iberia, a natural cul-de-sac peninsula, plays a major role in the study of the Neanderthals demise and its eventual relationship with the spread of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) in Europe. The site of Cova Eirós (Galicia, Spain), located in NW Iberia, contains Middle and Upper Palaeolithic levels, based on the cultural remains recovered at the s...

The Cantabrian Region is a broad area characterised by two main geographical essences: mountains and coast. On the contrary, from a geological standpoint, this region is very heterogeneous due to the different environments represented, organised through a West to the East general chronological gradation from the Precambrian to the Neogene, promotin...

Northwest Iberia is a Paleozoic territory almost void of flint outcrops. The arrival of Cantabrian Upper Paleolithic groups, used to flintknapping, to a new lithological region implied a reorganization of their technological basis. The analysis of four lithic assemblages, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Final Magdalenian /Azilian, allows us to...

The Franco-Cantabrian group of cave art ranks among the best known examples of Paleolithic symbolic behaviour. For more than a century no decorated cave was reported beyond the Nalón valley in the center of Asturias, until the carvings and paintings from Cova Eirós were discovered. At more than 100 km from the Nalón, Eirós' art remains an isolated...

The Vilapedre axe (Lugo, Northwest Iberia) has been traditionally considered by archaeologists as evidence of prehistoric long-distance contacts along the Atlantic Coast of France and Spain. This artefact-as other "Tumiac type" axes (long polished blades, generally butt-perforated)-would have been produced in Brittany during the Neolithic (5th mill...

Our knowledge about Paleolithic art has been changing substantially and new discoveries and dates are modifying some traditionally accepted considerations. In this context, the geographic spread and the end of this graphic-artistic cycle are two of the main topics of the current scientific debate. The discovery and study of rock art in Cova Eirós,...

El yacimiento de Cova Eirós, aunque ya conocido desde finales del siglo xx, se está erigiendo como una secuencia de referencia para el estudio del Paleolítico medio y superior del noroeste peninsular. Las intervenciones iniciadas en 2008 han proporcionado novedosos datos sobre los grupos neandertales del Paleolítico medio final. El hallazgo de arte...

Key-words: Microtus agrestis, Late Pleistocene, Anteroconid complex

The Atapuerca localities present evidence of a long series of hominin occupations from the Early Pleistocene onward and are a key site for understanding the continuity and discontinuity of Western European technological and settlement dynamics. The TD10 unit from Gran Dolina is located in the upper part of the sequence and divided into four lithost...

The introduction of farming had far-reaching impacts on health, social structure and demography. Although the spread of domesticated plants and animals has been extensively tracked, it is unclear how these nascent economies developed within different environmental and cultural settings. Using molecular and isotopic analysis of lipids from pottery,...

Fat residue analysis in sherds has allowed in the last years to target the cooking practices of prehistoric groups. Lipids identified in several ceramic samples from diverse sites in Northern Iberia show that dairy products were already present during the early stages of the regional Neolithic, side by side with meat derived from ruminants.

The discovery of a partially preserved vessel in the course of the excavations carried out in Cova Eirós brings forth new data on the material culture of the regional Neo-lithic. The pot, both in its bottle-like shape and decoration (shell impressed), recalls strongly the cardial ware, so characteristic of the archaeological record in the Early Neo...

Being at the western fringe of Europe, Iberia had a peculiar prehistory and a complex pattern of Neolithization. A few studies, all based on modern populations, reported the presence of DNA of likely African origin in this region, generally concluding it was the result of recent gene flow, probably during the Islamic period. Here, we provide eviden...

As Gándaras de Budiño es el yacimiento más emblemático del Paleolítico del noroeste pe-ninsular. la asociación de un registro lítico achelense con unas dataciones del Pleistoceno superior lo convirtió en uno de los yacimientos más controvertidos. Por ello, son numerosas las intervenciones arqueológicas y revisiones que intentaron comprender la prob...

As Gándaras de Budiño es el yacimiento más emblemático del Paleolítico del noroeste pe-ninsular. la asociación de un registro lítico achelense con unas dataciones del Pleistoceno superior lo convirtió en uno de los yacimientos más controvertidos. Por ello, son numerosas las intervenciones arqueológicas y revisiones que intentaron comprender la prob...

The archaeological digs carried out in Cova Eirós (Triacastela, Lugo) since 2008 have brought to light material culture from multiple chronologies. This paper deals with the analysis and interpretation of the significant pottery finds from historical periods. Among these, Early and Middle Medieval sherds are particularly numerous, together with a f...

Cova Eirós is located in the province of Lugo, north-western Iberia. The cave site contains a number of Palaeolithic engravings—narrow and shallow grooves—that are dispersed on the walls of the cave. As direct contact with the panel would be extremely harmful for the rock surface, we have decided to use 3D methods to record the motifs. Thus, we app...

Cova Eirós is located in the province of Lugo, north-western Iberia. The cave site contains a number of Palaeolithic engravings—narrow and shallow grooves—that are dispersed on the walls of the cave. As direct contact with the panel would be extremely harmful for the rock surface, we have decided to use 3D methods to record the motifs. Thus, we app...

Since the first half of the 1970s a number of studies on the microvertebrates of the Late Pleistocene of the Iberian Peninsula have been undertaken. In northwest Iberia, however, we only have the small-vertebrate analyses of Valdavara-1 and A Valiña. In this paper we are going to present the data from Cova Eirós. Cova Eirós is emerging as a referen...

Chert is traditionally considered the main lithological marker for the analysis of Paleolithic territories. Thus, in those regions like Galicia where that is scarce resource, petrographic analyses are not too common either. Moreover, local raw materials (quartz and quartzite, mainly) have not received much attention from the researchers. The petrog...

Valdavara 3 is a new early late Pleistocene paleontological and archeological cave site in northwestern Iberia. Over 1400 fossils have been collected, representing about 40 species. The fauna is of interglacial aspect and is in accordance with the OSL dates from the fossiliferous layer, which indicate an age of 103–113 ka. The great taxonomical div...

Los estudios de industria lítica en la Prehistoria gallega se han focalizado en la carac-terización crono-cultural de los conjuntos dejando a un lado el estudio de las materias primas y estrategias de abastecimiento. Por otro lado, el predominio de materias primas locales, como cuarzos y cuarcitas, ha colocado en un segundo plano el estudio de ma-t...

The paper deals with the importance of Alpine axe production, not only in much of central and Western Europe, but particularly in the Iberian Peninsula. Its distribution from Catalonia to Galicia has led us to consider the relevance that in the Neolithic, as well as in more recent periods, acquired exchange networks. Contacts between groups hundred...

Level TE9c of the Sima del Elefante site (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain) is one of the oldest sites with evidence of human occupation in western Europe. We began excavating level TE9c in 2003, and the work there continues today. The studies of the archaeology, palaeontology and geology from this locality have provided an indispensable dataset with whi...

The Aïn Beni Mathar-Guefaït basin provides a long stratigraphic sequence and a faunal record that covers the Early and Middle Pleistocene. During the Pliocene and Early Pleistocene, a fluvio-lacustrine basin developed in the area. This landscape has been occupied by hominin developing a Mode 1 technology. This fluvio-lacustrine basin has its final...

At Cova Eirós, we discovered 13 panels with paintings and engravings that stylistically point to the final moments of the Upper Paleolithic. Scanning electron microscopy with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and Fourier transform Raman spectroscopy were used to identify charcoal as black pigment. Although contamination from medieval fires insid...

Large polished axes of Alpine jade have circulated across Europe during the 5th and 4th Millennia BC. The presence of Alpine axes in the Iberian Peninsula is more restricted than elsewhere in Western Europe, but still significant.Thirty-seven pieces of probable Alpine origin have been catalogued in Iberia. Along with those Alpine jades, there are l...

Across the millennia spanning from the first peopling of NW Iberia to the last tracts of the Bronze Age, the human groups have adapted themselves to the environment. Moreover, they were affected by the shifting temperatures, the changes of the vegetal cover and other modifications of the landscape and far from being a passive subject, they often pl...

The application of the Chaine operatoire approach developed in the lithic studies during the last decades has overcome the assumed “archaic” character of the quartz lithic assemblages. These studies have gone beyond the informal appearance of the quartz artefacts in order to achieve a positive understanding of the technological strategies that rule...

From the archaeological project “Poboamento durante o Plistoceno medio / Holoceno nas comarcas orientais de Galicia” we promote a scientific dissemination effort focused on the archaeological, paleontological and natural heritage of the Eastern regions of Galicia. The support of the population, the Local Administration and the media configure an id...

The lithic assemblage of the Pont-de-Lavaud site (Indre, France) shows a technical choice within the Lower Pleistocene European Mode 1 sites, which is defined by the widespread use of the bipolar-on-anvil knapping technique. Although it is traditionally considered an expedient percussion method, in this lithic assemblage a selective technical behav...

In Western Europe, Acheulean cultural evidence is well attested by ca. 0.5 Ma. However, recent work has proven that it was present earlier; at the end of the Early Pleistocene. The timing and mode of the Western European Acheulean needs still to be investigated, and this knowledge appears to be strongly dependent upon data from sites with sufficien...

Human- carnivores interaction during the Palaeolithic represents one of the most popular topics in archaeological research. Competition between both predators for the same ecological resources and areas could imply: 1) an alternating occupation of the same habitat, 2) a co- occurrence pattern or 3) an alternating occupation with episodic co- occurr...

Hunting strategies in the Pleistocene-Holocene transition on the NW of the Iberian Peninsula: the case of Cueva Valdavara and Cueva Eirós. Valdavara and Eirós are two Galician caves that are 20 kilometers distant from each other, as the crow flies. The caves are located at the end of natural corridors leading to the Cantabrian coast and the central...

Abstract This paper expands upon the preliminary refit analysis of the NW area of unit TD10.1 at Gran Dolina (Sierra de Atapuerca, Burgos, Spain) (López-Ortega et al., 2011). The refit study described here has been conducted on the quartz and quartzite assemblage recovered from unit TD10.1, consisting of a total of 4302 artefacts (709 quartz and...

An outlook of the results of JADE II project on the presence of Alpine axes or their imitations in the Iberian Peninsula

The NW Iberia has often been described as a nearly empty space when considering the Paleolithic settlement of the Iberian Peninsula. This fact has been especially patent with respect to the Paleolithic art. The discovery at the end of the XXth Century of the open-air Paleolithic rock art in the Côa Valley has abruptly changed that perspective. The...

This paper is a new approach to the study of the Palaeolithic sites l