Arte mueble en el Auriñaciense Aantábrico. Nuevas aportaciones a la contextualización del frontal grabado de la cueva de Hornos de la Peña (San Felices de Buelna, Cantabria)

Abstract

In their excavations at the cave of Hornos de la Peña (Cantabria) at the beginning of the 20 century, H. Breuil, H. Obermaier and H. Alcalde del Río discovered the frontal bone of a horse engraved with a representation of that same animal. The excavators attributed the piece to the Aurignacian, but later studies have doubted whether it in fact belonged to that technocomplex. This doubt has arisen partly because until the stratigraphy at Hornos de la Peña has not been studied in detail and partly because the naturalistic character of the representation seemed to set it apart from the artistic conventions of the early Upper Palaeolithic of Cantabria. This article presents new information about the stratigraphy at the site obtained from a number of unpublished documents preserved in the archive of the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid, information that in our opinion supports an attribution of the piece to the Aurignacian.