Investigation in Pozarrate quarry at the Prehistoric flint mining complex of Araico-Cucho (Treviño), South Basque-Cantabrian basin. Latest results

Abstract

Recent works in the quarry of Pozarrate are providing new data for the understanding a part of the prehistoric mining complex of Araico-Cucho (Treviño). The quarry is one of many structures that are found throughout the area and that were made for the exploitation of the nodular flints outcropping along the landscape unit (lacustrinepalustrine Miocene). Pozarrate is composed of 8 structures that we identified and classified as crescent-shaped dumps. The archaeological excavation focused on the inferior dump which was dated 6000-5600 BP (uncal.) and thousands of lithic remains and artifacts have been collected, including mining tools. The investigation continues till today in order to find the limits of the quarry. Geophysical surveys (Electrical tomography and Geo-radar) have been carried out providing information that was likened to what at first intuited, confirming the existence of a quarry face between 4 and 5 meters high. The relevance of the flint mining complex is corroborated by the identification of the use of this raw material in many archaeological sites of the Cantabrian (from Asturias to the Basque Country), the Western Pyrenees and the south of Aquitanian Basin (France), with dates from the Upper Pleistocene to the Holocene.