Lithic Procurement at Montlleó Open-Air Site (SW Europe): Tracing Past Human Routes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Montlleó open-air-site (Prats i Sansor, Catalonia) is located in one of the largest high-attitude valleys in the Pyrenees, the Cerdanya Valley, in SW Europe, at 1,144 masl. The site is in a natural road to cross the Pyrenees in the eastern part. The site, discovered in 1998 and excavated since the 2000 by a multidisciplinary research team from the SERP (University of Barcelona), was occupied by hunter-gatherer groups during the Upper Paleolithic. Research has previously identified at least two different chronocultural occupations: one possibly dated from the Badegoulian (16,900 ± 110 BP and 18,860 ± 80 BP non cal) and another from the Lower Magdalenian (15,440 ± 80 BP and 15,550 ± 140 BP non cal). Lithic raw materials recovered at Montlleó are diversified by the presence not only of exogenous rocks, such as chert, but also by local rocks, such as rhyolite, quartz, quartzite, and lydite. The archaeopetrological study of the recovered lithic set has included micropaleontological, petrographical, and geochemical analyses (energy dispersive X-ray fluorescence and laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry). Results have allowed the determination of raw material origins, showing a great knowledge of the Pyrenean territory and making evident the relationship between both Pyrenean slopes during the Late Glacial Maximum.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Case Studies in Toolstone Provenance: Reliable Ascription from the Ground Up

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32397