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INTRODUCTION
The Sierra de Atapuerca is a great archaeo-palaeontological site with prehistoric occupations that have dates ranging from 1.3 Ma (Carbonell et al, 2008) to the Holocene. Three caves, Gran Dolina, Galería, and Sima del Elefante, were dug systematically in the Railway Trench. All three were filled with sediment that has been dated to the end of the middle Pleistocene (Figs. 1 and 2). Because of the age of the deposits, no evidence of Neanderthal occupation has been found in these caves to complete the sequence in the Sierra de Atapuerca record.
Figure 1.
(color online) Map of the upper Pleistocene open-air sites of the Sierra de Atapuerca and archaeological sites in the Cueva Mayor karst system. Modified from Navazo et al. (2008).
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Figure 2.
(color online) Gran Dolina stratigraphy and chronologies, from Berger et al. (2008), Galería stratigraphy and chronologies from Falguères et al. (2013), and Sima del Elefante stratigraphy and chronologies from de Lombera-Hermida et al. (2015). TL-IRSL ages: thermoluminescence (TL) and infrared stimulated luminescence (IRSL) dating. ESR-US ages: Combined electron spin resonance (ESR) and uranium series (US) dating. U/Th ages: uranium–thorium dating. pIR-IR ages: post-infrared infrared stimulated luminescence.
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In 1999, the Atapuerca Research Team began an archaeological survey in search of Neanderthal evidence (Navazo et al., 2017). The archaeological surface survey documented almost 30 sites attributed to the Middle Palaeolithic (Navazo and Carbonell, 2014). Test pits were dug to ascertain the stratigraphic depths of these sites, and three of them were excavated: Hundidero (Navazo et al., 2011), Hotel California (Arnold et al., 2013), and the Fuente Mudarra open-air site, which we present in this paper. Geological prospecting was carried out during the archaeological survey, and all outcrops and secondary deposits of the most representative material around the Sierra de Atapuerca lithic ensembles were documented (Navazo et al., 2008).
Three caves dug in recent years, Galería de las Estatuas in Cueva Mayor (Arsuaga et al., 2017; Demuro et al., 2018; Pablos et al., 2019), Cueva Fantasma, and La Paredeja (see Fig. 1), complete the record from the late Pleistocene, which provides evidence of the presence of Homo neanderthalensis in Atapuerca.
With the Fuente Mudarra study, we intend to complete the occupational model of the Sierra...