The research team is made up of specialists including anthropologists, geologists, biologists, as well as young people with university internships and Erasmus students from Portugal and Germany.

Archaeologists have found hundreds of prehistoric human remains in a cave in Spain

The research team is made up of specialists including anthropologists, geologists, biologists, as well as young people with university internships and Erasmus students from Portugal and Germany.

Archaeologists from the Santomera Historical Heritage Association have discovered hundreds of prehistoric human remains at a collective burial site in a cave in the Sierra de Malombre.

Excavations began last week, and archaeologists now face the time-consuming and tedious task of determining exactly how many corpses the skeletal remains belong to.

According to the president of the Santomera Heritage Association, professor and archaeologist Miguel Pallares, the remains could be at least 5,000 years old and belong to the early Stone Bronze Age settlers. And interestingly, they could be associated with some kind of ritual process.

Archaeologists first selected two caves/sites and conducted preliminary surveys to determine if there was real archaeological potential.

Having established that this is the case, a team of 10 researchers will spend another two weeks at the collective burial site, which is of greater significance than the other eight or nine burial caves previously documented by Association archaeologists in the area.

“In all of them, anatomical parts of the bodies were deposited, but if secondary and partial deposits of human remains were found in previously discovered caves, then in the cave, which is now being excavated, many more remains were found than in other caves,” Pallares explained.

Excavations are still at an early stage and it remains to be seen whether the site is actually worth excavating in future projects.