Departmental News

Posted:  Mar 03, 2026 - 12:00pm

Lawrence Straus, Emeritus Leslie Spier Distinguished Professor, together with Universidad de Cantabria Emeritus Professor Manuel Gonzalez Morales, have just published in UNM’s internationally respected Journal of Anthropological Research, a synthesis of 30 years of excavations & multidisciplinary analyses in El Miron Cave (Cantabria, Spain). 

For the first time, the full culture-stratigraphic record of c. 40,000 years of human occupations, both Paleolithic and post-Paleolithic, with references to the most significant publications of the project, can be found in one, up-to-date article.  The site spans the period between the last Neanderthals of the Middle Paleolithic (>40,000 years ago) to the Bronze Age (3000 years ago), and is dated by 102 radiocarbon assays. 

It is probably best known by the discovery of the ritual burial of a middle-age woman during the Magdalenian period, 19,000 years ago.   Straus’ article reviews the incredible genetic and anthropological evidence that has made the “Red Lady” of El Miron a key source of information on the human population of Ice Age Europe: biological, dietary, bacteriological and social.  However, the article also covers the very significant contributions of the site to the archeological, artistic, archeozoological and paleoenvironmental records of the Iberian Peninsula from the time of the extinction of the Neanderthals to the origins of farming and complex societies.  Excavations involved many UNM students (including several who did PhD theses) over the period from 1996, as well as students from the Universidad de Cantabria and literally across the World.

The article is the lead in JAR’s volume 82, the fourth volume under the Editorship of UNM Anthropology Professor Suzanne Oakdale, Straus’ successor as Editor-in-Chief after his 27 years at the helm of the Journal.