The first Large Flake Acheulean in Europe at Revilleja de Valparaíso site, Hortigüela, Spain

Abstract

Revilleja de Valparaíso (Hortigüela, Burgos, Spain) is a Large Flake Acheulean (LFA) lithic assemblage on the Iberian Peninsula that is crucial for understanding the technical traditions on which the European Acheulean in the Early Middle Pleistocene was founded. These lithic industries were discovered in an alluvial deposit that has been dated to 696 ± 32 ka (MIS 17), using Terrestrial Cosmogenic Nuclides (680 ± 60 ka) and Electron Spin Resonance on quartz (702 ± 32 ka), and forms the base of a higher degraded terrace, whose strath is currently preserved at +29-30 m above the River Arlanza (Duero basin). It is a strategic location that conserves a quartzite lithic assemblage with large cutting tools (LCTs) frequently knapped on flakes. Their affinity with LFA traditions and chronology suggests that: 1) around 700 ka, throughout Western Europe, there were populations that developed a heterogeneous Acheulean that subsequently became regionalised (MIS 12); 2) the Acheulean of the Iberian Peninsula with diversified LCTs, frequent use of large flakes to shape handaxes, and possibly cleavers, is earlier than 500 ka, closely related to the LFA and contemporary with North African Acheulean sites; and 3) MIS 19 (790-761 ka) was key in the processes that consolidated western European settlement by groups with heterogeneous technological traditions.