Middle Palaeolithic occupations are documented in various cave and rock shelter sites in Southern Spain such as Carigüela (Fernández et al., 2007) or Complejo del Humo (Ramos et al., 2005; Jennings, 2006). Since 2010 a Spanish-German team is working at a newly discovered site in the Province of Málaga: The Sima de las Palomas de Teba (Kehl et al. 2016). The site, situated within the Cretaceous limestone of the Sierra de Teba-Peñarrubia, contains an at least 7m-thick stratigraphic sequence. Its chronology reaches from Recent Prehistory to at least 55 kyrs BP with especially intense Middle Palaeolithic occupations at the bottom of the stratigraphy. Thus, questions about the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic, the long survival of Neanderthals in the southern part of Iberia as well as settlement dynamics in the late Middle Palaeolithic can be addressed. The presentation will give an introduction to the site and present first data on Neanderthal behavioural variability with respect to technological aspects in lithic production, site function and mobility patterns.
Literature cited
Fernández, S., Fuentes, N., Carrión, J.S., González-Sampériz, P., Montoya, E., Gil, G., Vega-Toscano, G., Riquelme, J.A., 2007. The Holocene and Upper Pleistocene pollensequence of Carihuela Cave, southern Spain. Geobios 40 (1), 75–90.
Jennings, R., 2006. Neanderthal and Modern Human Occupation Patterns in Southern Iberia during the Late Pleistocene Period (PhD thesis) Hertford College, Oxford.
Kehl, M., Burow, Ch., Cantalajo, P., Domínguez-Bella, S., Durán, J.J., Henselowsky, F., Klasen, N., Linstädter, J., Medianero, J., Pastoors, A., Ramos, J., Reicherter, K., Schmidt, Ch., Weniger, G.-Chr. (2016). Site formation and chronology of the new Paleolithic site Sima de Las Palomas de Teba, southern Spain. Quaternary Research 85, 313–331.
Ramos, J., Aguilera, R., Cortés, M., Bañares, M.M., 2005. El parque arqueológico de La Araña. Una vía para el estudio, la conservación y la puesta en valor de yacimientos paleolíticos. In: Santonja, M., Pérez-Gonzalez, A., Machado, M. (Eds.), Geoarqueoloía y patrimonio en la Península Ibérica y el entorno mediterráneo. ADEMA, Almazán, pp. 625–638.