Radiocarbon Database Reveals 10,000 Years of Human Presence High in the Spanish Pyrenees

Archaeologists at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB) have compiled the first openly published, systematic set of radiocarbon dates for a high-mountain area of the Pyrenees, documenting that people repeatedly occupied sites above 2,000 meters for more than 10,000 years. The open-access database, covering 124 radiocarbon dates from 45 of the 380 known archaeological sites in Spain's Aiguestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici National Park, was published alongside a study in ArcheoLogica Data.

Three excavated sites show continuous occupation spanning millennia. The oldest, the Obagues de Ratera rock shelter at 2,320 meters, was first used 10,000 years ago and shows activity through the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Bronze Age periods, into the Visigothic-era Middle Ages and the 19th and 20th centuries — a sequence coauthor Guillem Salvador called "exceptional" for the region. The Cova del Sardo shelter (1,780 meters) and the Portarro rock shelter (2,280 meters) show occupation stretching back 7,500 and 7,300 years, respectively.

At the Portarro rock shelter, excavations uncovered dry-stone-and-wood structures dating back 5,000 years, currently the oldest known example of stone architecture in the Pyrenees. Statistical analysis of the dataset identified periods of especially intense high-mountain activity, including the end of the Neolithic (5,300 to 4,500 years ago), late antiquity and the start of the medieval period. Researchers noted that the 5,300-year mark coincides with the era of Otzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, when other high-mountain areas of Europe also saw a rise in human presence above 2,000 meters.

"The sites located in high-mountain areas, places which for us would be inaccessible and inhospitable, often present long periods of human occupation," said Ermengol Gassiot, director of UAB's High Mountain Archaeology Group (GAAM), whose team has worked in the park for more than 20 years. The 380 recorded sites include enclosures, possible dwellings, rock shelters built from glacial stone accumulations, and a small group of stone circles that may be funerary monuments, challenging the idea that the high Pyrenees were an untouched wilderness.