The geologist Alfonso Benito Calvo, of the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has participated in the first excavation campaign at the Valparaíso site (Hortigüela, Burgos), financed by the Fundación Palarq and the Fundación Atapuerca, in collaboration with the Universidad de Burgos, which has enabled the recovery of about fifty Paleolithic handaxes.

This site was discovered by chance when a local man, Gerardo López, notified the archaeologist Eudald Carbonell that there could be stone handaxes in the surrounding earth. After collecting the appropriate permits, a team of ten researchers headed by Carbonell spent a week opening an area of 25 square meters to see the stratigraphic thickness of the site and take the samples necessary to determine its chronology.

During the excavation, a total of over fifty knapped pieces were recovered, mainly on quartzite pebbles, among which are various handaxes, cleavers and flakes, as well as some trihedral tools and cores for creating large flakes. These types of large-format utensils are hand tools our ancestors began making in Europe half a million years ago which gave rise to the technological mode II, or Acheulean.

In our continent, this knapping technology began to be developed by the pre-Neanderthals. Studying the traces of use on many of these Acheulean utensils has made clear that one of their characteristics is their multifunctionality, that is, they were used for everything. Thus, the same handaxe could have been used for butchering a rhinoceros, working wood or gathering plant fibers, interchangeably.

Benito Calvo has conducted the geomorphological and stratigraphic survey of the site, identifying the Quaternary sequence in situ where the archaeological remains had previously been studied on the surface. “The remains are found conserved in a fluvial deposit preserved between the valleys of the Arlanzón River and the Valparaíso Stream, whose chronology could date to around 250,000 and 350,000 years ago, according to analyses already carried out in the Arlanza River valley”, comments the CENIEH geologist.

A comparative study

Studying the stone tool assemblage from Valparaíso will make it possible to explore the manufacturing systems used and compare them with other assemblages of the same characteristics documented at the Galería and Gran Dolina sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca. The latter sites are barely 32 km from Valparaíso as the crow flies. Therefore, a comparative study of these places will reveal the technological relationships between the hunter-gatherer groups which occupied the Sierra de Atapuerca and those roaming around the middle and upper basin of the Arlanza River.

The Valparaíso excavation was directed by Eudald Carbonell i Roura (Professor of Prehistory at the Universidad Roviri i Virgili, honorary lecturer at the Universidad de Burgos and Vicepresident of the Fundación Atapuerca), with the support of Marta Navazo Ruiz (Professor of Prehistory at the Universidad de Burgos), Alfonso Benito Calvo (researcher at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana, CENIEH) and Francisco Javier García Vadillo (the holder of a research grant from the Fundación Atapuerca).

This archaeological intervention organized by the Fundación Atapuerca and the Fundación Palarq was possible thanks to the collaboration of the Cultural Territorial Service of the Junta de Castilla y León and the Ayuntamiento de Hortigüela.