La cantera de piedras de molino de Pardos, Geoparque de Molina-Alto Tajo (Guadalajara, España)

Zusammenfassung

The study of domestic millstone is of great interest from archaeological and geological perspectives because they are directly related to the economic and food activities of the human being. In addition, millstones are material elements that appear from Neolithic to very recent times. The studies focused on determining the raw material with which they were made, the place of origin of this and how it was extracted and manufactured have a very different development throughout the peninsular territory. In the case of the Celtiberian territory, there are scarce researches in this regard. In this work, we present the study of the rocks of a quarry of millstones located near the village of Pardos, within the Molina-Alto Tajo UNESCO Global Geopark (Guadalajara, Spain). It is an outcrop of volcanic rocks, mostly rhyolitic tuffs, of Permian age with columnar jointing deve- lopment. The quarry clearly shows how the humans have used ethno-geological knowledge to extract the material, taking advantage of the textural and structural properties of the rocky body of volcanic origin. In addition to the archaeological and ethnographic value the outcrop shows an important value associated to its petrology and volcanic morphology. Thus, this site could be considered as a Geosite.