Moving to the land: First archaeometric study of chert procurement at Cueva de la Cocina (Eastern Iberia)

Abstract

The present work represents the first attempt using an archaeometric approach to characterize the potential chert outcrops and retrace the provenance of the chert raw materials in the Mesolithic and Neolithic contexts of the Eastern Iberia central site of Cueva de la Cocina (Dos Aguas, Valencia). Therefore, a research project aimed at identifying and characterizing potential sources in the surroundings of the site was carried out, as a first step, to test some hypotheses related to raw material provenance. Elemental profiles of several archaeological artifacts and of geological samples collected in different local and nonlocal outcrops were obtained using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. These chemical data were processed using multivariate statistics to investigate the possible links between the outcrops and archaeological artifacts. Preliminary results point to the use of local raw materials and also the presence of rocks outcropping in a perimeter of more than 50 km around Cueva de la Cocina, opening a new window to investigate the socioecological dynamics of the last hunter-gatherer and the first farmer inhabitants from a diachronic point of view in this region.

Estudio de las huellas de uso y aplicación de análisis químicos no destructivos sobre un macroútil procedente del yacimiento de Hort de Cortés-Volcán del Faro (Cullera, València)

“…Las fracturas que presenta pueden estar relacionadas con su recuperación en el momento de la excavación. El análisis químico aplicado a los artefactos arqueológicos líticos ha permitido en otros estudios definir las posibles fuentes de aprovisionamiento y, por tanto, establecer el radio de movilidad de los grupos para la obtención de materias primas en el área mediterránea ibérica (Schmich y Wilkens, 2008;Prudêncio et al, 2015;Gallello et al, 2016;Roldán et al, 2016;Aura et al, 2020;Ramacciotti et al, 2019;2022). Sin embargo, aquí se realiza por primera vez un análisis de procedencia en una herramienta macrolítica.…”