A High Temporal Resolution Zooarchaeological Approach to Neanderthal Subsistence Strategies on the Southeastern Iberian Peninsula: El Salt Stratigraphic Unit Xa (Alicante, Spain)

Abstract

Analyses devoted to palimpsest dissection and archaeological assemblage formation are currently topics of growing interest in Palaeolithic research. For many researchers, it is becoming increasingly clear that the temporal dimension of archaeo-sedimentary deposits should not be overlooked, because approaches based on the analysis of diachronically deposited assemblages impede accurate behavioural interpretations. In this work, we present the results of the zooarchaeological and taphonomic analyses of faunal remains from several high-resolution analytical contexts defined by archaeostratigraphic techniques in Stratigraphic Unit Xa from the Middle Palaeolithic site of El Salt. Our main goal is to identify behavioural tendencies related to the treatment of animal resources at a temporal scale of analysis as close as possible to ‘ethnographic time’. The behavioural, spatial and temporal information resulting from this study and from previous works based on the lithic record is discussed in order to investigate the settlement dynamics of Neanderthal groups in the highlands of Alicante (southeastern Iberian Peninsula) during the MIS 3.