Re-evaluating the Neolithic: The Impact and the Consolidation of Farming Practices in the Cantabrian Region (Northern Spain)

Research projects undertaken in the Cantabrian region since 1980 have produced new, high-quality information about the neolithisation process(es) in this area. It is now necessary to review this archaeological information and test the main hypotheses put forward to explain it. This paper presents an update on the archaeological evidence (sites, chronological dates, archaeozoological, archaeobotanical and technological information) for the early Neolithic in the Cantabrian region. It summarizes recent research on neolithisation in the region, and assesses the impact of this process during the early Neolithic, and its later consolidation. Although the available information is still incomplete, it is now possible to identify the focal point of the introduction of elements characteristic of the Neolithic way of life in the region. Current evidence suggests that it is in the eastern sector, where the earliest arrival of domesticates and new technologies such as pottery has been attested. The existence of continuities—such as sustained reliance on hunting and gathering and the coexistence of old and new funerary rites—suggests the persistence of native populations, which gradually participated in the neolithisation process after an ‘availability phase’.     

Local amber in a Palaeolithic context in Cantabrian Spain: the case of La Garma A

It is important to determine the geological sources of Palaeolithic ambers in the south of Europe in order to understand the mobility and interchanges of prehistoric societies. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy analysis carried out on Upper Palaeolithic ambers from La Garma A cave (Cantabria, Northern Spain) allowed us to identify their source area. Their diagnostic features were found to be similar to the amber obtained in the Lower Cretaceous outcrops close to this archaeological site, and to differ clearly from Baltic amber, which has been generally suggested as the amber found in European prehistoric sites. These results show that the origin of the Gravettian amber found in La Garma A is local and, consequently, a hypothetical contact route is not required to be able to account for the presence of this material in the Iberian Palaeolithic context studied here. For the first time it has been demonstrated that the provenance of an archaeological amber in the Iberian Peninsula is local, with both geographical and spectroscopical evidences. Our study also concludes that the archaeological amber of La Garma A possibly belongs to an araucariacean resin that originated from the coniferous forests which grew in the northeast portion of the Iberian Plate c.110-million years ago.     

The Origins of the Neolithic Along the Atlantic Coast of Continental Europe: A Survey

The main aim of this work is to compare the processes of transition to the Neolithic along the Atlantic coasts of continental Europe. Archaeological data on the late Mesolithic and the early Neolithic in the best known regions (central and southern Portugal, Cantabrian Spain, Atlantic France, the shores of the North Sea, and southern Scandinavia) are discussed. The transition to the Neolithic in Atlantic Europe can be viewed as a relatively late phenomenon, with several interesting particularities. Among those, we point out the fundamentally indigenous character of the processes; the existence of a long availability phase, in which hunter-gatherer groups maintained contact with neighboring agriculturalists and probably were familiar with farming and animal husbandry without applying them in a systematic way; and the later development of megalithic monumental funerary architecture. Finally, the main hypotheses so far proposed to explain the change are contrasted with the available evidence: those that argue that the change derives from economic disequilibrium, and those that opt for the development of social inequality as the fundamental cause.     

Coming Through a City Near You: The Transport of Hazardous Wastes

Current figures (compiled in 1995) indicate that hazardous waste transporters (19,567 in number) ship approximately 16 million tons of hazardous waste annually in the United States (United States Environmental Protection Agency, 1995). While some state and local governments have enacted hazardous waste transport regulations for the protection of their citizens, the federal government has had primacy in initiating and setting the course of hazardous waste transport regulation. As a result, the predominant perspective on hazardous waste transport has been technical in orientation. This paper identifies and discusses how this technical perspective and the social perspective differ and what the consequences are for government policies and actions regarding hazardous waste transport.     

Looking to the Southeast Antilles: Iñigo Abbad y Lasierra's Geopolitical Thought in his Historia geográfica,civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (1788)

Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra’s Historia geográfica, civil y natural, completed in 1782 and published in 1788, is widely seen as the founding colonial history of Puerto Rico’s national history. This essay examines this imperial and comparative account, which cannot be dissociated from Abbad y Lasierra’s first important writing, his Diario del viaje a América completed in 1781. I argue that his observations and reflections on the condition and prospects of Puerto Rico are deeply influenced by his travel in the Caribbean’s southeastern circuit and, in addition, his readings of Spain’s foreign polemical detractors, in particular Guillaume-Thomas Ábbe Raynal and his Histoire philosophique et politique. This essay also sheds light on Bourbon dynamics in Puerto Rico and Abbad y Lasierra’s appeal to Romantic liberal creoles seeking abolition of slavery and sovereignty from Spain in the nineteenth century. Thus, the basis of Puerto Rican patriotic identity is found in Abbad y Lasierra’s intellectual appropriations sustaining his ideas on rational development and progress for the island.