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Pen management and livestock activities based on phytoliths, dung spherulites, and minerals from Cova Gran de Santa Linya (Southeastern pre-Pyrenees)

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Abstract

The archaeological evidence from Cova Gran de Santa Linya suggests that during the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, the site was used as a livestock enclosure where the accumulated excrements were burned, generating a sequence known by the term fumier. Here we present the results of an integrated study of silica phytoliths, dung spherulites, and mineral composition of sedimentary matrix from the remaining Holocene sequence. The use of fire to sanitize the space had important consequences for the preservation of dung spherulites and the accumulation of phytoliths. Phytolith assemblages indicate that the animals enclosed in the cave were mostly sheep that exploited the pastures nearby the site during the year. In this sense, the results from our modern plant reference collection challenge the assumption that grass inflorescence phytolith can be used as a seasonality indicator.

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Acknowledgments

This research was developed within the framework of various projects from the Spanish Government MINECO/FEDER (CGL2015-65387-C3-1-P). Cova Gran de Santa Linya is part of the project Human settlement during the Upper Pleistocene and Holocene in the South-eastern Pyrenees (HAR2016-75124-P and PID2019-104843GB-I00) and Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR2017-1357 and SGR2017-836). Fieldwork has been supported by the Servei d’Arquelogía- Generalitat de Catalunya. We thank the kind permission of the Societat de Munts de Santa Linya. Aitor Burguet-Coca’s research is funded by the Caja viva Fundación Caja Rural Burgos-Fundacion Atapuerca. Thanks to Boris Muñoz Coca and Laura Pinto Font for the help in the collection of the control samples. We are also grateful to three anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments on the earlier version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolucio Social (IPHES), Zona Educacional, 4 - Campus Sescelades URV (Edifici W3), 43007, Tarragona, Spain

    Aitor Burguet-Coca, Ana Polo-Díaz & Ethel Allué

  2. Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), Departament d’HIstòria i Història de l’Art, Avinguda de Catalunya 35, 43002, Tarragona, Spain

    Aitor Burguet-Coca, Ana Polo-Díaz & Ethel Allué

  3. Centre d’Estudis del Patrimoni arqueològic de la Prehistoria (CEPAP-UAB), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain

    Jorge Martínez-Moreno & Rafael Mora

  4. Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), Paseo Sierra de Atapuerca, 3, Burgos, Spain

    Alfonso Benito-Calvo

  5. Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, Biological Sciences Building, 32 Bishop Street, New Brunswick, NJ, 08901, USA

    Dan Cabanes

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  1. Aitor Burguet-Coca
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  2. Ana Polo-Díaz
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  3. Jorge Martínez-Moreno
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  4. Alfonso Benito-Calvo
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  5. Ethel Allué
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Correspondence to Aitor Burguet-Coca.

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Phytolith Nomenclature following the Code for Phytolith Nomenclature system (Neumann et al. 2019) with plant classification (XLSX 10 kb)

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Burguet-Coca, A., Polo-Díaz, A., Martínez-Moreno, J. et al. Pen management and livestock activities based on phytoliths, dung spherulites, and minerals from Cova Gran de Santa Linya (Southeastern pre-Pyrenees). Archaeol Anthropol Sci 12, 148 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-020-01101-6

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