Discoveries of the
El Mirón Cave


Lawrence Straus and researchers find Cro-Magnon art in Northern Spain.

by Karen Wentworth




________________________________________________

This summer, a shoulder blade of a red deer was found engraved, shaded, and bearing part of a three-dimensional image of a hind. Lawrence Straus knows from radiocarbon dating that the bone is about 15,700 years old—art from a time when Cro-Magnon hunters lived in an ice age environment in northern Spain.

For nine summers, University of New Mexico Professor of Anthropology Lawrence Straus has taken undergraduate and graduate students to dig in El Mirón cave. During the most recent dig, two undergraduates, Kait Knauber-Ferriegel and Matthew Dawson, found the engraved scapula as they excavated a trench near the cave entranceValles Caldera National Preserve.

Straus says this art form is typical of the region and the period in which it was created. But the context in which it was found is puzzling. It took time and talent to craft the piece, but it was found in the garbage—along with other bones, spear points, and stone tools. “It’s amazing to me how one of the most spectacular finds of my career was apparently considered disposable trash by the ice age hunters,” says Straus.

Photo courtesy of Lawrence Straus.

For nearly thirty years, Lawrence Straus has taught anthropology at UNM and has become one of the world’s leading experts on the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe. He has published fifteen books, written nearly four hundred academic papers, edited a scholarly national journal, and has spent his summers taking students into the field to dig into the past.

In 1996, Straus and archeologist Manuel González Morales of the University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain, began to excavate El Mirón in the Cantabrian Mountains. Straus had first seen the cave in 1973 and knew that many archeologists dismissed it, believing the rubble and silt-filled outer chamber had been too disturbed by looters and herders to offer much that was intact. However, Straus and González Morales thought the cave might hold something worthwhile and decided to excavate.

They have found and radiocarbon-dated bones, artifacts, and engravings on rock. With funding from the National Science Foundation, the Leakey Foundation, the National Geographic Foundation, Fundacíon Botin, and regional and national governments in Spain, they began to document a story of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons who hunted in the mountains and spent time in this cave between 41,000 and 10,000 years ago during the late Paleolithic period.


Image courtesy of Lawrence Straus.

In addition to these discoveries, Straus and González Morales have been able to prove that the Mesolithic foragers of the Cantabrian coast didn’t begin to farm, domesticate animals, or use pottery until 5,700 years ago—about 800 years after other nearby groups just over the mountains in the Mediterranean-draining Ebro River Valley. As it is, El Mirón has yielded the oldest evidence for agriculture in northern Atlantic Spain. Because of this, Straus and fellow researchers have wondered why it took the mobile foragers so long to adapt to an agrarian lifestyle.

Straus thinks the thick forests that separated the mountains from the coast 10,000 years ago could have been a major barrier between the two groups, but the large time gap still puzzles him. This and other questions posed by excavation at the El Mirón cave are complex, and for Straus and his students, the hunt for the answers continues.