Radiocarbon Dates for the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Occupations of Cova Rosa (Ribadesella, Asturias, Spain)

Abstract

Four excavations have been performed at the archaeological site of Cova Rosa (Asturias, Cantabrian Spain): three of them in the second half of last century and the other in this decade. Although little of the archaeological material found in those excavations has been published, here we attempt the stratigraphic correlation of sections revealed by the different excavations and we present 22 new radiocarbon dates for bones and marine shells, built in a Bayesian statistical model. This has enabled the documentation of occupations that mainly took place during the Last Glacial period, in the Solutrean (middle and upper phases) and Magdalenian (archaic, lower, and upper phases), and also in the early Holocene (Mesolithic). These occupations are compared with the record at other sites in Cantabrian Spain in general and in Asturias, in particular.

Determination of lithic raw materials in Cantabrian Spain during Greenland Stadial 2: The Magdalenian of Tito Bustillo Cave (Ribadesella, Asturias)

“…In the central sector, fewer studies have been carried out on archaeological lithic raw materials, even though in that geographic area the study of La Riera Cave (Asturias) was a pioneer in its approach to the classification of lithic resources into types based on their petrographic description and analysis (Straus et al, 1986). Other sites in Asturias where raw materials analysis, also focused on the identification of the different flint types, have been applied to Middle Magdalenian at Las Caldas -Chamber II (Levels IX, VIII and VII) (Corchón et al, 2009), and to Lower Magdalenian at El Cierro (Level F) ( Álvarez-Fernández et al, 2016) and Cova Rosa (Layer 4 = CR2) ( Álvarez-Fernández et al, 2020( Álvarez-Fernández et al, , 2021, although in those cases with quite limited samples (Fig. 1).…”