Flint quarrying in north-eastern Iberia: quarry sites and the initial transformation of raw material

Prehistoric communities carried out quarrying activities to obtain raw materials for tool production. These were produced either directly for immediate or later use by the same groups who quarried the stone, or indirectly by distributing the raw material or partially or completely manufactured products to third parties. All these procedures could be performed within a temporal and spatial sequence of variable extent, giving rise to archaeological evidence of very different types (Nelson 1991; Ingold 2012).Archaeological surveying was funded by the Government of Catalonia and the Spanish National Research Council within the framework of the LITOcat Project. Excavation and research are sponsored by the Government of Catalonia (‘Prehistoric and historic uses of flint in Catalonia: contexts of extraction and first transformation’, grant 2014/100778) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (‘Productions, technical variability and technological innovation in the Neolithic’, grant HAR2016-76534-C2-2-R).Peer reviewe