Ocupaciones paleolíticas e industrias líticas de la Gruta Furninha, Peniche (Portugal)

Abstract

Furninha Cave was the object of a very early paper by Nery Delgado in 1884. The description of Pleistocene lithic and faunal materials implied that there had been a Paleolithic occupation in the cave. That was confirmed by the later work of Breuil and Zbyszewski in 1945, where they attributed those materials to the Middle and Upper Paleolithic. Some 30 years later, O. da Veiga Ferreira (1962) and J. Roche included some of the Furninha materials in their own synthesis of the Portuguese Solutrean. By the end of the century, J. Zilhão (1997) excluded most materials attributed by Breuil and Zbyszewski to the Upper Paleolithic, stating that this occupation was highly ephemeral and those materials thought to be Upper Paleolithic were, in fact, Neolithic or later. With the present study, with a new and complete revision of the lithic paleolithic assemblages in a total of 389 artifacts, the presence of Mousterian, Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian occupations in Furninha were clearly demonstrated. Finally, we also present a new interpretation based on the lithic analysis and a reanalysis of the cave stratigraphy, and the attribution of the different materials to the original bone beds described by Nery Delgado in 1880. This interpretation indicates that the original field work was of great quality, and that the stratigraphical mixing thought to have happen by most researchers, including Breuil, Roche and Zilhão, most likely did no take place and the cave was kept essentially pristine up to the moment of the complete excavation by Delgado.