Earliest Evidence Of Forest Management Discovered At The La Draga Neolithic Site

AncientPages.com | July 18, 2023 |

Jan Bartek - AncientPages.com - Researchers have identified 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 confirms the presence of human groups in the area before they settled there, showing they selected, marked and controlled 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 of these 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 in 2022.

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.

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