Lithic cultural variability during the Gravettian in the Cantabrian Region and the western Pyrenees: State of the art Aitor Calvo a, * , Marcel Bradtm € oller a , Lucía Martínez b ,  Alvaro Arrizabalaga a a Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (UPV/EHU), Facultad de Letras, Departamento de Geografía, Prehistoria y Arqueología, C/Francisco Tom as y Valiente s/n 01006, Vitoria-Gasteiz,  Alava, Spain b Universidad de Oviedo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,  Area de Prehistoria, C/Teniente Alfonso Martínez s/n 33011, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain article info Article history: Available online 23 October 2015 Keywords: Lithic raw materials Flint Quartzite Upper Paleolithic Gravettian abstract The field and laboratory work carried out in recent decades have substantially changed our vision of various aspects of the Gravettian in the Cantabrian Region and the western Pyrenees. The objective of this work is to carry out a critical synthesis of the available data for the lithic industry of the Gravettian in this region, according to raw material procurement, exploitation strategies and typological markers. Thereby several aspects are of importance: (1) the alternating availability of high quality raw material, where two territories can be divided: one to the West, where raw material acquisition is showing a wide range of raw materials (notably flint, quartzite, quartz), and one to the East, where assemblages are completely dominated by a single raw material: flint; (2) the great similarity between different reduction strategies, mainly in relation to flint; and (3) an existing polymorphism throughout the territory in case of the tool types, within which protrude two typological groups: back elements and burins, notably the Noailles burins. The latter are massively present in the eastern part of the Cantabrian Region and the western Pyrenees. This variability does not seem to correspond to chronological phases, but has to be probably understood in functional terms. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Field and laboratory work carried out in the past several decades has yielded new, important data on the artistic representations, material culture, subsistence strategies, palaeoenvironmental context and geochronology of the Gravettian in the Cantabrian Region and western Pyrenees (e.g. De la Pe~ na, 2009, 2011a; Arrizabalaga and Iriarte, 2010; Casta~ nos and  Alvarez-Fern andez, 2013; Cuenca-Solana et al., 2013; Garate and Rios-Garaizar, 2013; García-Díez and Ochoa, 2013a, 2013b; Iriarte-Chiapusso and Mur elaga, 2013; Martínez and De la Rasilla, 2013; Rivero and Garate, 2014; Bradtm€ oller et al., 2015a). Whereas three decades ago the Gravettian was thought of as a brief, bridge-like period between the two better-known Aurignacian and Solutrean techno- complexes, it is now known to have spanned approximately 9000 years (ca 34e25 ka cal. BP), almost a third of the whole of the Upper Palaeolithic. In terms of its lithic material culture, the above studies have revealed a great industrial variability, the cultural and/or chronological meaning of which still remaining to be determined. In this respect, in the eastern area of the Cantabrian region and the western Pyrenees the predominance of a particular burin mor- photype, the Noailles burin, is striking; this type of burin has been noted in the oldest levels (e.g. Aitzbitarte III Va, ca 29e26 ka BP; Ríos et al., 2011) through to the most recent (e.g. Antoli ~ nako Koba Lab, ca 22 ka BP; Aguirre Ruiz de Gopegui, 2013), the opposite pattern to the one noted in the general sequence proposed for France, where it is basically confined to the middle phase of the Gravettian (e.g. Djindjian, 2011; Noiret, 2013). On the other hand, the central and western sections of the Cantabrian region are, technologically-speaking, more ambiguous, and backed tools represent their most diagnostic element types. Despite this, it has not yet been possible to determine this cultural interval's internal organisation through the study of its lithic industry, as has already been done in reference regions such as the Dordogne (Arrizabalaga and de la Pe~ na, 2013; Bradtm€ oller et al., 2015a). Another important development in terms of fieldwork is the growing number of open-air site discoveries. These kinds of * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: aitor.calvo@ehu.es (A. Calvo), marcel.bradtmoeller@ehu.es (M. Bradtm€ oller), lucia_satis@hotmail.com (L. Martínez), alvaro.arrizabalaga@ehu. es (  A. Arrizabalaga). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Quaternary International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/quaint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.09.027 1040-6182/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd and INQUA. All rights reserved. Quaternary International 406 (2016) 25e43