Straus Receives ‘Homenaje’ from Spanish Society

Lawrence Straus receiv­ing bronze ‘bas­ton de mando.’ Photo cour­tesy of Ana Belen Marin-Arroyo

Leslie Spier Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Anthro­pol­ogy Lawrence Straus was given a “hom­e­naje” by the Sociedad Pre­histroica de Cantabria in San­tander, Spain. The “hom­e­naje” is sim­i­lar to a life­time achieve­ment award, for the exten­sive exca­va­tion and research he and his Span­ish col­league, Pro­fes­sor Manuel R. González Morales, have con­ducted at El Mirón Cave in Cantabria, and for more than 40 years of research and pub­li­ca­tions on Cantabrian Spain since 1972.

This sum­mer, Straus also gave the keynote address on his inter­pre­ta­tion of the Solutrean period (23–20,000 years ago) and pre­sented a paper on El Mirón Solutrean occu­pa­tions at the II Con­greso del Solutrense in Alme­ria (Andalucia). In addi­tion, he gave two lec­tures on Upper Pale­olithic human adap­ta­tions and econ­omy and on the El Mirón human bur­ial in the par­lia­ment of the Cantabrian region in San­tander, and a pub­lic talk on the El Miron Project in a series of lec­tures on pre­his­tory in which he has par­tic­i­pated for many years in the town of Puente Viesgo, below the great site of El Castillo in Cantabria.

Straus has spent 17 years actively exca­vat­ing El Mirón.  Each sum­mer since 1996 he has led a team of grad­u­ate and under­grad­u­ate stu­dents in search of infor­ma­tion about the peo­ple who lived in or used the cave.  He spent this sum­mer in Spain doing analy­ses of stone and bone arti­facts col­lected from El Mirón and con­sult­ing with the human pale­on­tol­o­gists who are ana­lyz­ing the skele­ton found there in 2010-11. The remains have been carbon-dated to be about 19,000 years old. A mono­graph, “El Miron Cave”, was pub­lished by UNM Press in February.

Straus is a renowned expert on the Upper Pale­olithic and has spe­cial­ized on the early mod­ern humans who replaced the Nean­derthals in West­ern Europe some 35–40,000 years ago.  He has exca­vated in SW France, Por­tu­gal and Bel­gium, as well as in Spain. His 19th book, “The Mag­dalen­ian Set­tle­ment of Europe,” which he co-edited with T. Ter­berger of Uni­ver­si­tat Greif­swald in Ger­many and D. Leesch of Uni­ver­site de Neucha­tel in Switzer­land,  already avail­able elec­tron­i­cally, is due out in hard copy as a spe­cial dou­ble issue of “Qua­ter­nary Inter­na­tional” in Sep­tem­ber.  Straus has been Editor-in-Chief of UNM’s “Jour­nal of Anthro­po­log­i­cal Research” since 1995.

Media con­tact: Karen Went­worth (505) 277‑5627; email: kwent2@unm.edu