Academics: Excursion to Atapuerca

This Friday IES Comparative Religions course headed a few hours northeast of Salamanca for an archaeological field study. We started the day early, with the bus departing at 7 am from the IES center. The first part of the trip was my favorite, a visit to the archeological park at Atapuerca. We learned from our very knowledgeable guide how to make fire by rubbing sticks together and how to create bi-face stone tools for separating meat from bones, tried our hand at spear throwing and bow hunting for straw bales (I’m not too well-suited to this, it turns out), painted with iron oxides on an adobe wall, and explored reproductions of several types of cabins that our ancestors would have lived in during various periods of prehistory.

The next part of the trip was a visit to the yacimientos, or dig sites. We learned how the research, which is still being done today, is carried out and what some of the most impressive finds have been- we were shown reproductions of several of them. Our guide explained various hypotheses about the use of the caves we were viewing and quizzed us on how we thought the researchers would have arrived at such conclusions. We were even treated to a 3-D movie showing in an actual cave where we saw renderings of what life would have been like for several early human species, what they ate, and how they used tools. We wore hard hats for this part of the excursion, which made it all the more exciting.

The last stop we made was in Burgos, and we were fortunate to have a couple of hours of free time to explore the city before our next scheduled event.  Burgos has a lovely Plaza Mayor and a gorgeous cathedral, the only cathedral in Spain that is itself a world heritage site (there are several others in Spain, including ours here in Salamanca, that form part of such a heritage site together with the historic centers of the cities where they are located). We strolled through the old town and stopped to snack on fruit in a park overlooking the river.

The culmination of the trip was a visit to the Museum of Human Evolution, also in Burgos. This museum was only constructed in 2010, but its collections hold some of the oldest artifacts of humankind. Here we saw the original versions of the artifacts we had discussed at the dig sites, including Pelvis Elvis, the oldest fossilized pelvis that has yet been discovered. It is the habit of Spanish archaeologists to name artifacts after kings, and since Elvis was the king of rock one cannot help but find the name doubly appropriate upon recalling his preferred style of dance.

After we finished the tour we headed back to Salamanca, tired and happy to have had such an exciting visit to a unique place.