© Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
General and detailed image of the anthropic marks identified on bay tree posts at La Draga. Right: Oriol López-Bultó at La Draga, with an oak post recovered from the site.
UAB researchers identify marks carved intentionally on bay trees some five or ten years before the Neolithic settlement of La Draga was built in Banyoles 7,200 years ago.
The discovery allows confirming the presence of human groups in the area before they settled there by selecting, marking and controlling the forests.
A research team from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has found the
earliest known evidence of forest management based on the analysis of several anthropic markings located on posts made out of bay tree wood (
Laurus nobilis) used in building La Draga (Banyoles, Girona), the only lakeside Neolithic site of the Iberian Peninsula
dating back 7,200 to 6,700 years.
The research was conducted by Oriol López-Bultó, Ingrid Bertin and Raquel Piqué, from the UAB Department of Prehistory, and archaeologist Patrick Gassmann, and was published in the
International Journal of Wood Culture after being presented at the
From Forests to Heritage conference held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
The study indicates that the trees were marked several times with adzes. The wood continued to grow on top of the scars left by the marks, and some five to ten years later, those same trees were cut down and converted into posts to be used in the early phases of building the settlement.
Marks such as the ones found at La Draga had been previously identified at a site located in Switzerland, the Hauterive-Champréveyres site, but were at least 1,000 years younger than the ones found at La Draga.
Comment: Greenland, as its name suggests, may have been ice-free - or at least sufficiently hospitable for pastoralism and agriculture - as little as a millennia ago: