El desarrrollo de la investigación en los yacimientos Paleolíticos de Torralba y Ambrona (Soria, España) a partir de los diarios inéditos de Dolores Echaide

The archaeologist Dolores Echaide (1928-2018) devoted much of her professional life to the excavation and research of the Acheulean sites of Torralba and Ambrona, integrated into the projects led by F. C. Howell in 1961-1963 and by Howell and L. G. Freeman in 1980-1983. Echaide contributed fundamentally in each field season in the organization of work teams. She participated outstandingly recording the lithic and bone remains, planning and carrying out the stratigraphic control of the excavation processes, especially in Ambrona. Her diaries, as well as other documents that she produced –all of them recently deposited in the CENIEH- collect many notes which provide detailed information about the investigations carried out in both sites. The project started in 1961 in Torralba responds to the same principles that researchers like Desmond Clark or Howell himself had begun to adopt in Palaeolithic East African sites, based on the application and interpretation of an anthropological and multidisciplinary concepts. These interventions opened a methodological line that is still valid today. However, the campaigns carried out in Torralba and Ambrona had unfortunately very little Spanish participation, almost exclusively reduced in the archaeological aspects to Dolores Echaide. The first phase (1961-63) had virtually no impact on the development of the research on the Lower Palaeolithic in Spain; in a later stage (1980-1983), despite the work in Ambrona being partially funded and supported by Hispanic entities, the integration of Spanish archaeology into the research of Ambrona was also still poor.