Lithic raw material procurement at the Chaves cave (Huesca, Spain): A geochemical approach to defining Palaeolithic human mobility

The Chaves cave (Huesca, Spain) is located in the central Pre-Pyrenean range in NE Iberia. It is a huge cave opening to the east, which was systematically excavated between 1975 and 2007. Several human occupations from the Upper Palaeolithic and the Neolithic periods were documented. Archaeological investigations had barely covered a tenth of the total area when they were abruptly interrupted by the destruction in 2007 of most of the archaeological sediments and all the preserved Neolithic levels that had not yet been excavated. While the most intensive prehistoric occupations of the cave were Neolithic, several components from the Upper Palaeolithic were also detected and excavated before 2007. The recovered lithic tools, as well as the radiocarbon dates, revealed that the Chaves cave was frequented by hunter-gatherer groups during the Upper Solutrean and the Upper Magdalenian. Lithic raw materials from the Palaeolithic levels are diverse, with several chert types identified. The recovered lithic set was subjected to micropaleontological, petrographic and geochemical analyses (energy-dispersive X-ray Fluorescence and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry). The results revealed several origins for the chert, not only from the southern Pyrenees but also from the northern versant, demonstrating that this mountain range was regularly crossed during the Upper Palaeolithic.