Session 7 - Using airborne lidar to detect megalithic quarries in salas council (Fernando del Cueto)

Описание: This paper explores a specific landscape in the central and southwestern part of Salas council (NW Iberian Peninsula), which contains three prehistoric cemeteries chronologically framed between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age periods: Corradas, Idarga and Penausen. These areas contain more than twenty barrow structures, some of them partially explored in the seventies. For instance, Idarga and Penausen show remarkable examples of the stone chambers. A kind of structure that was very common in the last phase of the Asturian megalithism (ca. 3,500 BC), as the dolmen of Cobertoria has recently demonstrated. The Project of Cobertoria is currently getting new data about the possible quarries of six different prehistoric cemeteries. The main goal of this presentation is to show how airborne LiDAR and related techniques can help the identification of possible outcrops and links between these quarries and the megalithic chambers. Overall, these prehistoric spaces will be analysed from a geological point of view, using LiDAR to identify the original position of the raw materials. Although three of the cemeteries have no scientific excavations, field survey works allowed us to point out preliminary hypotheses about the internal composition of the tumulus, as it occurs in Idarga’s or Penausen cemeteries. In both areas, the enormous quantities of stones present on the surface of the hill show the presence of building materials in the nearby funerary space. Finally, the distances gathered at the end of the analysis will allow us to carry out a most detailed approach to the indigenous communities, the type of the materials used in each case as well as the connections between the quarries and the tombs. These are key aspects for understanding the monuments and the role that they have played inside the prehistoric landscapes.