The Red Lady Cave Burial in Northern Spain

Some 19,000 years ago, a woman was coated in red ochre and buried in a El Mirón cave in northern Spain. Her cave-grave had a highly unusual ombstone, and archeoligist believe it may have been adorned with flowers. She was buried in a side chamber at the back of the cave and it appears that the many who took shelter for millennia after her death must have been unaware of the prestigious company they were keeping. "It's an area in the cave right where people were living," says Lawrence Guy Straus at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Along with Manuel González Morales of the University of Cantabria, Straus has been leading the excavation of El Mirón for 19 years. "It's not hidden away. This person in death was kind of presiding over the activities of her people."

She was between 35 and 40 when she died. Her remains were laid to rest alongside a large engraved stone. "The lines seem to be sort of random, but there is a motif that is a triangle – repeated lines that make a V-shape," says Straus. "What is being represented, at least by some of these lines, might be a female person. Conceivably, this block serves as some kind of marker." It's as if the Red Lady had a primitive tombstone stating she was female. Her body was daubed in sparkling red pigment made from an imported special form of ochre that sparkled with specular haematite, a form of iron oxide. Small, yellow flowers may even have adorned her grave 18,700 years ago – a time when cave burials, let alone one so elaborate, appear to have been very rare. It was a momentous honour, and no one knows why she was given it.

"You can't get away from the conclusion that this person, [out of] the hundreds and perhaps thousands of Magdalenians who once existed for several thousand years in Iberia, was given some kind of special treatment," says Straus. "God only knows why." Could she have been some sort of leader or queen? "We don't really know much about the social structure of these hunter-gatherers, whether they were matriarchal or patriarchal societies," says Ignacio de la Torre of University College London.

SOURCE
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