Carlos Lopez Left
Barrika (Bizkaia) (EFE).- Some 70,000 years ago, groups of Neanderthals recurredly procured raw material from the flint outcrops of what is now Barrika. On the coast of this Basque town they found one of the best deposits of this material in the entire Cantabrian Sea.
The quality of this type of rock of great hardness, which when fractured produces unbeatable cutting edges for making stone tools, became a true “supermarket” for primitive humans. Also for Homo sapiens, who for millennia came to this point to collect from Cantabria, Asturias and the rest of the Basque Country.
The vestiges of all that activity are now studied by archaeologists from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and members of Edestiaurre Arkeologia Elkartea. They focus on the “Zabaletxe” area, a Paleolithic site that became a veritable “open-air supermarket” for flint, according to the director of the excavations, Álvaro Arrizabalaga. New ancestors used to recur to it for supplies until only about 4,500 years ago.
They did not dig mines
“At that time they weren’t digging mines to get the raw material yet, so they went to the sites where it was very close to the surface and set up a workshop.” This is the case of “Zabaletxe”, where they gave the rock a first treatment to discard the “bark” and obtain the nodules from which they would later make their weapons and stone tools.
Arrizabalaga explains that in this way they avoided having to carry useless “weight” during the journeys back to the camps where these nomadic groups lived more frequently.
The visits to “Zabaletxe” thus became “excursions” or “logistical expeditions” that they would carry out once or twice a year to stock up on flint for a few days in which the group would establish themselves in a “provisional” camp where, for On the other hand, he continued with his usual tasks such as hunting, perhaps fishing, and gathering.
open air site
Although it is very difficult to find remains of these activities in an open-air site such as “Zabaletxe”, where organic remains disappear quickly, Arrizabalaga clarifies that in the two excavation campaigns carried out to date, experts have located hundreds of lithic remains as a result of of the carvings made in this place, some of them tips and tools that were discarded due to some kind of problem or because they broke during their manufacture.
“There are no whole sheets or well-made tools that are not deteriorated,” explains Arrizabalaga, who clarifies that at the level where the excavations are now found, most of the objects discovered are of the “Chatelperronian” type and were made about 42,000 or so ago. 43,000 years.
“It is a hinge culture between the Middle Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic that, in the opinion of many, is made by Neanderthals but that, in the opinion of others among whom I find myself, corresponds to the Cro-Magnons (Homo sapiens),” he explains. Arrizabalaga, who does not hide that this fact gives even more interest to the Biscayne site.
“Chatelperroniense” level
The investigations, which have the support of the Barrika and Plentzia Town Halls, have also made it possible to determine that under this “Chatelperroniense” level there are other “Mousterians” who are already clearly Neanderthals and probably go back to 60,000 or 70,000 years ago.
The researchers will still take several campaigns to reach the base of the deposit, still located some six meters below the surface and which would correspond to the tidal level, on which thousands of years ago a “sedimentary structure” began to be generated from of a windswept dune area.
The sand was deposited on the flint objects discarded by our ancestors and covered them “quite quickly”, so that they have been fossilized and preserved to this day.
The results obtained by the archaeologists in this place are so interesting that this year Arrizabalaga will present a communication about them at the next meeting of the Congress of European Archaeologists, which in this edition will take place in the northern Irish city of Belfast.