SPEGEOCHERT

What do we know about the mobility of hunter-gatherer groups that lived 11.000-35.000 years ago in western Europe? How did they interact with mountain areas during the last glacial episode? To answer these questions, the ERC-funded SPEGEOCHERT project will focus on the Pyrenean mountain chain.

By studying the lithic tools and those made of chert, it will uncover the economic and adaptive strategies of Homo sapiens of the Upper Palaeolithic. The aim is to determine whether mobility between the two parts of the Pyrenees was only through the ends of the mountain range or whether it involved secondary routes.

Results will broaden our knowledge of human adaptations to harsh conditions and change the archaeological approach to analysing lithic raw materials.

SPEGEOCHERT is an ERC Starting grant led by Marta Sánchez de la Torre.

This project aims to deepen our understanding of human mobility and territoriality during the Upper Paleolithic in the Pyrenean region through the study of lithic chert tracers. The specific objectives are:

To identify accessible geological sources of four lithological chert tracers widely used during the Upper Paleolithic in the Pyrenees.

To characterize each outcrop associated with the selected tracers, focusing on their geological and geochemical properties.

To determine the presence of the selected lithological tracers in Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites across the Pyrenean region.

To develop multivariate statistical procedures for transforming the quantitative data obtained from geochemical and spectroscopic characterization.

To create predictive models using GIS (Geographic Information Systems) analyses to infer the most suitable routes for crossing the Pyrenees and connecting archaeological sites with geological chert outcrops.

To reconstruct patterns of mobility and human territoriality, from the first Modern Humans to the last Pleistocene hunter-gatherers in the Pyrenees.

The project has seven work packages: