The La Garma Cave, 11 kilometers from Santander, was known, until now, as a great site of rock art, as a kind of extension of the legend of the neighboring Altamira, which since 1996 had the category of UNESCO World Heritage Site. . From now on, the value of La Garna will have to be revised upwards, because the archaeological investigations of the last two and a half years have allowed us to jump from the wall to the territory, from painting to architecture.
The team led by paleontologists Pablo Arias and Roberto Ontañón have discovered a village of cabins from 16,800 years ago in the lower gallery of the cave. According to Ontañón, until now, cabin communities, contemporary with that of Cantabria, were known in Russia and France, but they had always been found on plains and in the open air, never in a closed space. In La Garna, in an immense cavity that was closed by a landslide during the time of the Visigoths, the habitat is unusual and the conservation conditions are exceptional. "La Garna is a time capsule." Researchers have inventoried 300,000 Neolithic remains and believe they are not even halfway through their survey.
Some background information: La Garna is an irregular and large space, 300 meters deep, with several levels of height and at least a couple of entrances and with abundant water sources. Humans have frequented it since the Neolithic until 1,300 years ago, almost without interruption, making the cave one of the longest occupation sequences known to paleontologists. In the period that Arias and Ontañón now study (contemporary of the Altamira paintings), the cold was very intense, with frequent temperatures of -15º Celsius. The inhabitants of the cave, communities of between 20 and 30 people, were hunters and gatherers, they went to the sea to collect shellfish and, as proven by investigating their habitat, they had a very complex symbolic and spiritual world. In La Garna there were domestic, productive and transcendent subspaces.
Why did those people install cabins inside their cave? To protect yourself from the cold? "Yes, but not only. The tents had a pragmatic function, of course, but they were also connected to their belief system. There are structures 130 meters deep, in spaces of total darkness that they must have reached with grease lamps. And they are decorated with paintings, engravings and furniture. It is clear that there was a symbolic use of them," says Arias.
The La Garna cabins were oval tents measuring five meters square, made of skins and propped up by the walls of the cave and stone blocks. They could seat four people and were arranged on the surface of the cave with reasonably functional criteria, according to the resources offered by the place.
When we talk about cabins, are we talking about families in a more or less modern, nuclear sense? "We think not, although there are few human remains and genetic studies are still beginning. The tents are too narrow. Obviously, we are talking about small communities in which there were many kinship ties, but we know that relationships within the community were avoided. "In fact, we know that La Garna functioned as a point of attraction for other neighboring towns, that people went to La Garna to form new couples."
The portrait of that Neolithic world given by the La Garna surveys is surprising. First: that was a relatively prosperous and stable world, despite the climatic hostility of the ice age. We have the teeth of a 45-year-old woman that show us that her owner never suffered any type of dietary stress. She was never hungry or lacking any type of nutrient. The idea of the Neolithic as a very harsh and unstable world, focused exclusively on survival, is not real. We have evidence that the work took two hours a day," explain Arias and Ontañón.
Nor was it a violent or lonely society. "In the communities of hunters and gatherers there were conflicts, as in all societies, but they were resolved by fission, not by confrontation. If you got along very badly with your community, you left," they explain. "And there is material evidence of shells arriving from the Mediterranean."
The working method followed by Arias, professor at the University of Cantabria, and Ontañón, director of the Museum of Prehistory and Archeology of Cantabria, deserves an explanation. "We tried to make an omelette without breaking the eggs," they say. That is to say: their work is as least invasive as possible since they began prospecting in the cave in 1996. The archaeologists would invent and analyze without removing anything that appears in the sacred soil of La Garna. The dissemination of its treasures is done through 3D and digital recreations. The originals are not and will not be in museums. This is the case of a phalanx of an aurochs (a type of Neolithic fighting bull, weighing one ton), pierced with figurative representations of human faces and animal profiles. It is the most formidable piece in the cave.
Arias and Ontañón presented the progress of their research yesterday at the National Archaeological Museum, accompanied by their collaborators Rodrigo Portero and Carlos García-Noriega and by the Palarq Foundation, which in 2021 awarded them their National Archeology award. Its endowment has allowed us to develop this last phase of research. "There is work left for the next 100 years."
