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V

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PREHISTORY ND THE SE
RE SO URC ES IN T HE PA ST

Introduction
A knowledge of how
marine resources were
used in prehistoric times
can help us to understand
the history of the spread
of humankind around the
planet. Coastlines and large
river basins concentrate a wide
variety of nutrients that were
essential for our evolution as a
species. They also served as great
thoroughfares in the migrations
of peoples, and as reference points
for the meeting of dispersed human
groups.
This exhibition explores the marine
resources found at archaeological
sites in the central area of the Iberian
Mediterranean from the beginning of the
Upper Palaeolithic until the Bronze Age,
that is, between 35,000 and 3,300 years
before the present, preserved today at the
Valencia Museum of Prehistory.
The earliest exploitation of marine
resources
The first indications of the consumption
of marine resources come from African
deposits dating from over a million years
before the present. Around 165,000 years
ago, with the expansion of Homo sapiens,
mussels and limpets were collected for
consumption. Between 100,000 and
70,000 years ago the first objects of
personal adornment appeared.
In Europe, the first traces of the
consumption of marine resources are
associated with groups of Neanderthals
living on the southern coast of the
Iberian Peninsula some 150,000 years
ago. The food consumed comprised seals
and cetaceans, especially dolphins, and
molluscs such as limpets and mussels.
Bivalve mollusc shells were also used to
make instruments similar to those made of
stone, or could be used as pallets or ochre
containers; shells of the genera Glycymeris
and Acanthocardia collected on the beaches
were used as ornaments.
The spread of the use of personal
ornaments is reflected in sites associated
with our species during the Upper
Palaeolithic.

The Iberian Mediterranean region
Changes in the sea level, and in
the position of the coastline,
have affected the conservation
of coastal archaeological sites.
Several examples reflect the
extent of the flooding of the
littoral plain in the Iberian
Mediterranean since the Last
Glacial Maximum, some 21,000
years ago. North of Cabo de la
Nao, the flooded area ranged in
width from 40 km near Gandía to
more than 100 km south of the Ebro
Delta. For this reason, in the Gulf of
Valencia no coastal deposits are known
until well into the Holocene, about 9,000
years ago, at which time the position of
the coastline was close to what it is today.
In the south of the Iberian peninsula, on
the Andalusian coasts of the Alboran Sea,
the morphology of the continental margin
has prevented any notable changes in the
position of the coastline; there, we find sites
that are currently on the coast, but in times
when the sea level was lower were only
some five kilometres inland.
Fish and shellfish
The marine environment offered many
attractions for prehistoric groups. The
procurement of marine resources did not
require the use of any complex technical
equipment, and all members of the group
could take part, both young and old.
Molluscs on the cliffs, easily visible and easy
to detach, would have been collected by
hand.
The few instruments related to fishing
that have come down to us from these
early times comprise serrated arrowheads
or harpoons and small double-pointed
hooks made of shaft and bone from the
Upper Palaeolithic. These hooks endured
until the third millennium BP. The use
of perishable materials such as wood and
plant fibres to make nets and traps for
catching fish is documented 9,000 years
ago in northern Europe and is still used in
traditional fishing in the Mediterranean,
but there is only indirect evidence of their
use in southern Europe in prehistoric
times.

Consumption and preservation
The most frequently consumed fish in
prehistoric times in Valencia was sea bream.
Together with other species – meagre,
mullet and stingray – and cockles, its
consumption reflects the exploitation
of brackish lagoons with soft bottoms,
marshes, and estuaries. Rocky substrates
in the intertidal area would also have
been exploited; here, limpets, winkles and
purpuras would have been collected.
These marine resources were consumed
in coastal settlements, but bivalve molluscs
and saltwater fish were also transported to
sites more than 35 km inland; they were
processed on the coast and then kept as a
food supply for people making journeys
inland from the sea.
As regards fish consumption and
preservation, some sites present traces of
smoking and it is probable that drying
was also used. This technique is still found
today in Formentera, where the opened
headless bodies of several species of small
sharks and rays are dried in the sun, and
then hung from the branches of juniper
trees.
As for molluscs, they could be
consumed raw, boiled or steamed by
pouring water over hot stones.
Utensils made from mollusc shells
Some mollusc shells were used to
manufacture instruments. With antecedents
in the Middle Palaeolithic, the available
evidence becomes more abundant from
the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic.
At Parpalló, many of the Pecten remains
documented at this site show signs of use
as instruments, and 10,000 years ago in
Catalonia double-pointed tips and blades
resembling stone objects were made with
the edges of a shell of an indeterminate
species.
Between the Neolithic and the Bronze
Age, the use of seashells as utensils is
documented in sites in the central regions
of Valencia. The most common shells are
of the genus Glycymeris, and bear signs
of alteration such as abrasions, microstriations, polishing, lustre, retouching, or
the presence of dyestuffs, indicating that
they were used for a range of purposes:
for instance, as containers for dyes, and
most likely to smoothen and burnish soft
materials such as leather and ceramics.
Sporadic finds include needles and a
chisel made from bivalves, large triton shells
with the apex removed used as percussion
instruments, spoons that used the siphonal

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channel as the handle and the last whorl as
the bowl, or a ladle made by removing half
of the shell.
Utensils made from cetacean bones
In the Cantabrian area between 17,500 and
15,000 years ago, cetacean bones were used
to make artefacts, mostly assagais or bone
tips. They were distributed throughout the
western Pyrenees, at distances greater than
350 km from the sea.
Due to their uniqueness, special
mention should be made of the use of
whale vertebrae, spinal discs and ribs found
in silos in various sectors of the La VitalSanxo Llop site dating from between 5,800
and 5,200 years BP. These bones would
have been scavenged at the beach after
a whale had run aground. They present
abundant traces of beating and cutting
produced by stone and metal instruments,
which bear witness to their use as work
benches or anvils.
Art, adornments and rituals
There is a substantial increase in marine
remains in the central-southern Iberian
region from the end of the Upper
Palaeolithic and during the Mesolithic,
used for both nutritional and symbolic
purposes. This growth may be associated
with the appearance of representations of
marine fauna – seals, fish and birds – in
Palaeolithic wall art. In the Cantabrian area,
representations of marine fauna are also
found; here the teeth of seals and cetaceans
were used as ornaments or pendants.
Technology
A wide range of raw materials were used
to make ornaments in prehistoric times.
Preponderant among them were the shells
of marine molluscs – gastropods, bivalves
and scaphopods. A significant number
of shells already perforated by the action
of the sea or by lithophagous animals
were collected on beaches; the others
were pierced using a variety of techniques
for use as beads, pendants, buttons or
brooches. Among the methods used by
humans to create perforations, experimental
archaeology has identified abrasion, by
rubbing the shell against a sandstone rock,
direct percussion on the shell with a stone
or a hard hammer, pressure exerted on the
hole in the shell with a pointed stone or
bone object, or rotation performed with a
stone drill.

Adornments
The use of particular species of molluscs as
personal adornments is considered to reflect
a specific cultural and social choice. These
ornaments relate to the symbolic world and
convey information – possibly related to
sex, age, a rite of passage, a social position
within the group, or the identification of a
group with respect to others.
Twenty-eight thousand years BP, at
the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic,
gastropod molluscs were the most
frequently used supports. Later, some
20,000 years ago, during the Glacial
Maximum, scaphopods were the most often
used; next, we find the sea snails Nucella
lapillus, a cultural marker of this cold
period, which became less abundant later.
Only at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic,
between 12,000 and 11,000 years ago,
did bivalves outnumber gastropods and
scaphopods in the creation of ornaments.
During the Mesolithic and Neolithic
the range of species used to make
ornaments narrows considerably; the
most abundant species is the gastropod
Columbella rustica.
With the advent of the production
economy, artisans began to make other
fully faceted ornaments: discoidal beads,
oval pendants, rings and bracelets during
the Neolithic, and buttons during the
Chalcolithic.
Funeral rites
Interpreting the funeral rites of the
communities of the past is particularly
difficult, because the only evidence that
may give us an idea of their social and
cultural behaviour is the material culture.
Human remains and the grave goods that
accompany them are the only sources
available to us.
In a grave at the early Neolithic site of
Costamar, dated between the end of the
eighth and the beginning of the seventh
millennium BP, an adult male between 30
and 35 years old was interred with seven
pectunculus bracelets bearing remains of
ochre and a necklace comprising more than
eight hundred discoidal mollusc shell beads.
More complex is the individual grave
of an adult male in the settlement of Tossal
de les Basses, in a pit dating from the last
quarter of the seventh and first half of
the sixth millennium before the present
containing two pectunculus bracelets and
three groups of mollusc shells, including

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limpets, Phorcus turbinatus and clams.
In both cases, these individual burials
are believed to correspond to prominent
members of those communities.
Shells and funerary contexts
The transport of shells of no nutritional
value and without traces of human
manipulation to sites far from the coast
suggests that they might be considered as
amulets associated with the symbolic world.
We have examples from the Palaeolithic
at the Cova del Parpalló and from the
Neolithic at the Cova de l’Or, where
extraordinarily well-preserved murex shells
(Bolinus brandaris) have been found.
The symbolic meaning of unmodified
marine mollusc shells is even clearer when
they are deposited in funerary contexts, in
numerous burial caves of the late Neolithic
and Chalcolithic (the second half of the
sixth and fifth millennium BP) located in
the inland regions of Valencia, where they
may have been used as funerary offerings.
Here we find shells of both bivalves and
gastropods, always in very small numbers
and almost always with signs of marine
erosion, indicating that they were collected
on the beaches once the animal was dead.
However, the study of the Cova del
Cara-sol in Vernissa (Xàtiva) yielded ten
adult specimens of Phorcus turbinatus,
an edible gastropod, which do not show
any evidence of bioerosion; conceivably,
they were collected alive in a rocky coastal
environment and were then deposited as a
food offering.
A dolphin in a grave
One of the storage silos excavated at the site
of Sanxo Llop, dated between 5,800 and
5,200 years BP, was later reused for funeral
purposes. There, a bottlenose dolphin
(Tursiops truncatus) was deposited in a
secondary burial alongside human remains,
those of an adult male.
There is no evidence of anthropic
manipulation indicating that the animal
was eaten, and so it appears to have been
deposited whole as a funeral offering.
Other funerary structures at this site
contained land animals such as dogs,
bovids, caprids and swine, deposited
either intact or fragmented. This practice
is frequently documented in other
Chalcolithic sites in Iberia; however, the
presence of a dolphin in a funerary ritual
context is exceptional.

MUSEU DE PREHISTÒRIA DE VALÈNCIA. JUNE - NOVEMBER 2021
Corona, 36. 46003 València · www.museuprehistoriavalencia.es. Follow us on

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