Program > By author > Aura-Tortosa Joan-Emili

The Nerja Cave, located on the coast of the Alboran Sea, has documented one of the few stratigraphic sequences in the Western Mediterranean, where the transition from the Upper Pleistocene to the Early Holocene has recorded. The proximity of the site to the coastline makes the Nerja cave a key settlement in the study of the management of marine resources by past societies. The archaeological interventions carried out by Professor Francisco Jordá Cerdá, between 1979 and 1987, in the Sala de la Mina, provided levels with abundant malacological remains dated to the late Upper Magdalenian period between 12.300 and 11.900 cal BC (levels XVI, XV and XIV), the Geometric Mesolithic between 6200 and 6000 cal BC (levels XIII, XII and XI), the Middle Early Neolithic between 5300 and 5100 cal BC (levels X, IX, VIII, VII and VI) and the Resent Early Neolithic between 5050 and 4900 cal BC (level V). Archaeomacological studies show the continuity of marine mollusc harvesting practices between the Late Upper Pleistocene and Middle Holocene. This paper presents, on the one hand, the taxonomic, quantitative and biometric analysis of the specimens of the genus Patella, the most abundant gastropod at the site, and on the other hand, the results of the seasonality study based on the analysis of stable oxygen and carbon isotopes of the shells of the species Patella caerulea from the Nerja cave. The aim is to determine the management of marine molluscs by the last hunter-gatherer and early Neolithic societies, and whether there was a change in the exploitation strategies of this marine resource between 13,000 and 6,000 cal BP in the Western Mediterranean.