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La Riera Cave: Geography and Culture

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

La Riera is a small cave in the karstic complex of La Llera ridge on the coastal plain of eastern Asturias, in Posada de Llanes, halfway between Santander and Oviedo (northern Spain). Other nearby Paleolithic and Mesolithic sites include Cueto de la Mina, Bricia, Coberizas, Tres Calabres, Balmori, Quintanal, Fonfria, Arnero, etc. The deposits in La Riera both overlap and complement the important culture-stratigraphic sequence in the adjacent rock-shelter of Cueto de la Mina, which spans some 18,000 years between the Gravettian and the Asturian. La Riera, Cueto de la Mina, and the other sites were discovered and excavated in the 1910s by the Conde de la Vega del Sella, whose palace is located nearby. His monographs on Cueto de la Mina, La Riera, and Balmori (Vega del Sella 1916, 1930), and Hugo Obermaier’s observations thereon in Fossil Man in Spain (1924), provided information of extraordinary quality and value for the period. In 1917–1918, La Riera specifically yielded a series of...

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References

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Straus, L.G., Clark, G.A. (2018). La Riera Cave: Geography and Culture. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_1327-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_1327-2

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