María Cruz Berrocal

• PhD
• Researcher at Spanish National Research Council

Malaria-causing protozoa of the genus Plasmodium have exerted one of the strongest selective pressures on the human genome, and resistance alleles provide biomolecular footprints that outline the historical reach of these species¹. Nevertheless, debate persists over when and how malaria parasites emerged as human pathogens and spread around the glo...

Research on rock art around the world takes for granted the premise that rock art, as a product of the Upper Palaeolithic symbolic revolution, is a natural behavioral expression of Homo sapiens , essentially reflecting new cognitive abilities and intellectual capacity of modern humans. New discoveries of Late Pleistocene rock art in Southeast Asia...

Heping Dao B (HPDB) is an archaeological site located in the small island of Heping Dao, off Keelung, northern coast of Taiwan. The site preserves a very complex and uninterrupted sequence of occupation from the early occupation of Taiwan, in the Neolithic, to the present times. It comprises therefore the prehistory of the island, its transition to...

Since 2011, archaeological work has been carried out at the HPD-B site on Heping Dao Island, off the coast of Keelung, northern Taiwan, under direction of Dr. María Cruz Berrocal and Dr. Tsang Chenghwa. Initially, the project aimed to locate and study the Spanish colony of San Salvador de Kelang, identified in the historiographical sources. It was...

In the past the relevance of plants amongst indigenous inhabitants of the Mariana islands was crucial. They provided food, raw material for building and crafting wooden objects including ships and canoes, but also for ritual and medicinal purposes. Up to now, archaeobotanical research in the Pacific has focused mostly on the translocation of severa...

The archaeological site of Heping Dao (northeast Taiwan) has produced relevant information about the ephemeral material culture related to the day-to-day life of the Japanese occupation of the island. The exceptional preservation of organic remains by water saturation has provided the opportunity of developing a multidisciplinary study. The study o...

The Hoorn Archipelago in Western Polynesia, comprising the islands of Futuna and Alofi, was in May 1616 the place of the very first long encounter between European navigators and Polynesians in the Central Pacific. The potential consequences of the two week stop of the Dutch sailors J. Lemaire and W. Schouten in Leava Bay have been a neglected topi...

Despite being a perishable material, wood can nonetheless show in its full complexity the materiality of daily life activities, identity construction, economic exploitation, and adaptation in colonial processes. The study of two sets of wood samples in well-defined archaeological colonial contexts from the site of Heping Dao, on the northern coast...

Evidencia analógica y chamanismo en la Interpretación Arqueológica: Arte rupestre sudafricano y paleolítico europeo MARÍA CRUZ BERROCAL ______________________________________________________ Traducción César Augusto Velandia Jagua Los estudios de arte rupestre han dependido fuertemente de la etnografía en las últimas décadas. Desde la década de 197...

We present a large-scale geographic analysis of the prehistoric archaeological record of Taiwan. This preliminary study shows the existence of general patterns in the settlement throughout prehistory – ca. 4th millennium BC to the 17th century AD –. The general trend shows an initial coastal occupation potentially linked to the Neolithic colonizati...

Historical narratives on Oceania have over the last two centuries mainly focused on the second half of the eighteenth century as the significant period of first encounters between Pacific Islanders and Western explorers. However, the first crossing of the region by Fernando de Magallanes (Ferdinand Magellan) was in 1521. More importantly, it has be...

The paper is an introduction to the study of European migration into Asia-Pacific through the case study of northern Taiwan. Here, several Spanish and Dutch colonial outposts were founded during the first part of the seventeenth century. Since 2011 and up to 2016 we have uncovered six burials of the cemetery of the Spanish colony of San Salvador de...

We present the results of six years of archaeological work carried out in Heping Dao, Keelung, northern Taiwan. The site has revealed a rich archaeological record spanning a sequence that comprehends most of the history of Taiwan, including the most salient historical landmarks in it. The study of this long-term sequence of habitation in Heping Dao...

This chapter argues that traditional historiography has overlooked the extent of early encounters between indigenous populations and Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By emphasizing only the eighteenth century as the time of the first relevant European presence in the Pacific, traditional historiography ignores the potential con...

We briefly review the topics that our case studies in Vanuatu, Marianas, the Philippines, Taiwan, China, Vietnam, and Japan highlight, and note the value of these studies in framing a comparative approach to colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region. Each case study highlights different aspects in the colonial relationship. The chapters have been grou...

We briefly review the topics that our case studies and note the value of these studies in framing a comparative approach to colonialism in the Asia-Pacific region. Each case study highlights different aspects in the colonial relationship. The chapters have been grouped following a geographical criterion, and the imbalance reflects the fact that som...

This book seeks to contribute a global comparative archaeological approach to colonial processes and colonial situations related to the Hispanic Monarchy and the ways in which they were experienced. Beginning with the better known Americas, it follows with Africa and the Pacific in a wish to explore Spanish colonialism beyond the parameters of exis...

This chapter presents the theoretical framework and scientific questions behind recent archaeological investigations undertaken in the hitherto relatively under-researched Spanish colony in Taiwan, founded in the seventeenth century. Despite its potential role in subsequent global developments, this historical episode has been downplayed in mainstr...

Archaeologies of Early Modern Spanish Colonialism illustrates how archaeology contributes to the knowledge of early modern Spanish colonialism and the "first globalization" of the 16th and 17th centuries. Through a range of specific case studies, this book offers a global comparative perspective on colonial processes and colonial situations, and th...

Moturiki is one of the high islands in the Lomaiviti Group, central Fiji. In this article we present exhaustive empirical information on archaeological survey and test pit excavations carried out in 2008 and 2010. An interesting archaeological landscape emerged, with 89 archaeological sites found on Moturiki and neighboring islands Yanuca Levu, Lel...

Claire Manen , Thomas Perrin & Jean Guilaine (ed.). La transition néolithique en Méditerranée. 464 pages, numerous colour and b&w illustrations, and tables. 2014. Arles: Errance; 978-2-87772-574-3 paperback €59. - Volume 89 Issue 344 - María Cruz Berrocal

We present results from four field seasons in Fiji focused on rock art research. We recorded previously noted sites and surveyed particular areas in search of new ones. The results tend to confirm the scarcity of Fijian rock art, as our research has produced a total of 23 sites. Nonetheless, this fact implies some interesting aspects. First, there...

The first use of domestic plants and animals in the Western Mediterranean has been a matter of debate, since there are no native ancestors for these elements. The current paradigmatic position favors an introduction by human migrants who reached southern France and the Iberian Peninsula through seafaring. The settlers would have introduced the whol...

We argue in this paper that Levantine rock art in the Spanish Mediterranean basin allows us to ‘map’ the economic landscape of its makers. Rock art would be the ‘monumental’ side of a dual process of landscape construction: on the one hand, rock art is the first ‘cultural’ action on the landscape beginning in the Early Neolithic; on the other hand,...

The document reflects the work and successive meetings of the World Rock Art Archive Working Group in 2010 and 2011.

Rock art studies have been strongly reliant on ethnography in recent decades. Since the 1970s, the (re)turn to ethnography has been considered short of a paradigmatic change, and it has indeed stirred a lot of theoretical discussion in the very under-theorized field of rock art research. The ethnographic turn has been mainly built around shamanism,...

Presentamos un análisis historiográfico de la investigación del arte levantino desde su comienzo hasta nuestros días, a través de un estudio bibliométrico basado en una muestra de 521 registros (notas, comunicaciones en congresos, artículos, capítulos de libros y monografías) y 235 autores, que consideramos suficientemente representativa. Hemos def...

RESUMEN La correcta documentación del arte rupestre ha sido una preocupación constante por parte de los investigado-res. En el desarrollo de nuevas técnicas de registro, direc-tas e indirectas, la fotografía ha ido adquiriendo mayor protagonismo. La imagen digital y su tratamiento permi-ten nuevas posibilidades de observación de las figuras re-pres...

Este artículo revisa la arqueología feminista, fundamentalmente norteamericana, y su contribución a la comprensión de la arqueología como ciencia. Se sintetiza brevemente el origen y desarrollo de la arqueología feminista, su relación con la arqueología de género y la arqueología posprocesual, y su valor como crítica epistemológica de la disciplina...

The paper reviews American feminist archaeology and its emphasis on the scientific character of the discipline. It is a synthesis of the origin and development of feminist archaeology, its links to gender archaeology and postprocessual archaeology, and its value as an epistemological critique of the discipline. The paper also considers the developm...

Rock art has been regarded as a second class archaeological data source. In this paper we use Levantine rock art as a case study, to show how this situation can be reversed. This rock art, found along the Mediterranean region of the Iberian Peninsula, has been considered to be typically Mesolithic due to its distinctive hunting scenes. A review of...

El Corpus de Arte Rupestre Levantino (1971-1976) es una recopilación de fotografías a color e información contextual sobre las tres cuartas partes de las pinturas conocidas en el arco mediterráneo español, cuya calidad todavía no se ha superado. La reconstrucción de su génesis se basa en bibliografía, archivos e historia oral cuyo valor para la his...

Este trabajo se ocupa de la relación hipotética que podría establecerse entre el arte rupestre y el paisaje en el que aquel se localiza, basada en las características locacionales del primero. El conjunto de arte rupestre estudiado es el llamado "arte levantino", localizado en la parte oriental de la Península Ibérica. Este arte rupestre puede ser...

[ES] El Corpus de Arte Rupestre Levantino (1971-1976) es una recopilación de fotografías a color e información contextual sobre las tres cuartas partes de las pinturas conocidas en el arco mediterráneo español, cuya calidad todavía no se ha superado. La reconstrucción de su génesis se basa en bibliografía, archivos e historia oral cuyo valor para l...

Se estudia el arte rupestre del Arco Mediterráneo (que incluye a los convencionalmente conocidos como Arte Levantino, Arte Esquemático y Arte Macroesquemático, entre otros estilos), nombrado Patrimonio de la Humanidad en 1998, desde el punto de vista de su localización. Las fuentes de información utilizadas fueron trabajo de campo, revisión cartogr...

Resumen Se presenta una serie de experimentos con fotografía multibanda realizados en mayo de 1998 en estaciones de pintura rupestre levantina pertenecientes al conjunto del Barranco de la Valltorta (Castellón): Cova dels Cavalls y La Saltadora, así como un fragmento arrancado (posiblemente de Coves del Civil) que se conserva en el Museo de la Val...

A historiographic analysis of Levantine rock art studies from their origins to the present using a bibliometric study is presented. The research is based on a bibliographic data base integrated by 521 records (notes, reports, papers, chapters of books and monographs) and 235 authors. Three periods (1907-1960, 1960-1980, 1980-1995) have been defined...

Adequate graphic recording has been one of the main objectives of rock art research. Photography has increased its role as a documentary technique. Now, digital image and its treatment allows new ways to observe the details of the figures and to develop a recording procedure which is as, or more, accurate than direct tracing. This technique also av...