The Mesolithic of Atlantic Coastal Spain – a comparison with the Middle Ebro Basin

Abstract

This paper compares current evidence for Mesolithic adaptations along the north Spanish coast from Galicia in the west to the Basque Country in the east. Significant questions and issues pertinent to Mesolithic research are reviewed, followed by a brief discussion of advances in method and theory over the past 25 years. Cantabria, País Vasco, and Galicia are compared with each other and en bloc with evidence from the middle Ebro over the 12-6 ka BP interval considered to bracket the transition between foraging and domestication economies. Marked differences in the time-space grid, geology, and the resolution of the data hinder these comparisons. A radiocarbon database totaling 610 dates is compiled, cleaned, filtered and analyzed for each region individually using summed calibrated date probability distribution (SPD) curves as a proxy for population density fluctuations over time. Regional curves are then compared with each other and with a global model.

Impacts of Early Holocene environmental dynamics on open‐air occupation patterns in the Western Mediterranean: insights from El Arenal de la Virgen (Alicante, Spain)

“…Finally, different regional studies used time series analyses of summed probability distributions of calibrated radiocarbon dates (SPD) to discuss the impact of the 8.2k cal a BP climatic event on Iberian Mesolithic populations (Bernabeu et al, 2014 andMontes et al, 2016;Fyfe et al, 2019;Alday et al, 2018;Fernández-López de Pablo et al, 2019;McLaughlin et al, 2021;Clark and Barton 2022). These studies reported very different results: from studies identifying positive trends in demographic growth such in the Iberian Atlantic areas of Central Portugal (McLaughlin et al, 2021) and Asturias-Cantabria (Clark and Barton 2022), to others that do not identify a clear impact as in the Mediterranean area (Fyfe 2019) and the Ebro valley (Clark and Barton 2022;Alday et al, 2018), or those that, at subregional level, have identified both positive and negative trends (Fernández-López de Pablo et al, 2019;Bernabeu et al, 2016;Montes et al, 2016).…”