Beers with Lawrence and Insights into Magdalenian Visual Display at El Mirón Cave

Summary

In 1996 Lawrence Guy Straus embarked on new adventures in fieldwork at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, northern Spain. As a young University of New Mexico graduate student the author joined him there from 1997–2000. Excavating literally thousands of Magdalenian artifacts and features in the cave’s corral area and visiting other Magdalenian caves on weekends made Lawrence’s fact-filled and captivating classroom lectures come alive. The author’s fascination with personal ornamentation and long-distance trade and exchange melded with Lawrence’s suggestion of a grand synthesis of existing Magdalenian information. That combination set her on a long, challenging, but ultimately rewarding path of dissertation research that explored relationships among visual display, population density, and social mechanisms of colonization. As one of the very special, favored Magdalenian caves in Cantabria, El Mirón has continued to yield information that, when examined in the context of larger regional patterns, provides further insights into Magdalenian social behavior across space and time. El Mirón helped Lawrence’s university career end with a flourish and will continue to provide fodder for years of professional contributions by Lawrence in retirement and by his students and colleagues.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Papers in Honor of Lawrence Guy Straus

Keywords

Spatial Coverage