Architecture of a Bench-Type Carbonate Lake Margin and Its Relation to Fluvially Dominated Deltas, Las Minas Basin, Upper Miocene, Spain

The Upper Miocene stratigraphic succession of the Las Minas Basin, located at the external zone of the Betic Chain in SE Spain, preserves several examples of lake carbonate bench deposits. Excellent exposures of the carbonate benches allow detailed observation of the architecture of these sediments and provide new insights for the ‘‘steep-gradient bench margin–low energy’’ model proposed by Platt and Wright (1991). The lake carbonate benches developed in close association with fluvially dominated shallow deltas that exhibit typical Gilbert-type profiles. The delta sequences comprise bottomset prodelta marl facies, distal to proximal foreset facies, deposited mainly in a delta-front environment, and topset facies, the latter reflecting both subaqueous delta-front and subaerial delta-plain environments. The development of the carbonate benches was constrained by the convexupward morphology of the deltaic deposits, which led to the available accommodation space for the growth of the steep-gradient platforms. The benches display a progradational pattern characterized by sigmoid-oblique internal geometries and offlap upper boundary relationships, which suggests that the carbonate benches developed under slow though continuous lake-level rise. Both the dimensions of the benches and the dominant carbonate components (i.e., encrusted charophyte stems and calcified cyanobaterial remains), allow comparisons with the progradational marl benches recognized in modern temperate hardwater lakes. Accordingly, the case study presented here provides a good ancient sedimentary analog for low-energy lake carbonate benches. Moreover, the evolutionary trend inferred from the fossil example offers new insights into the depositional conditions of this type of sediment and allows recognition of the transitional pattern from bench to ramp carbonate lake margins.

Génesis y desarrollo de las asociaciones agrícolas y de propietarios territoriales en España

Since relatively a few years ago research work regarding the genesis and evolution of agrarian organizations in our country has been carried out. Studies with a marked regional emphasis that, rarely were able to reference the true state of the associational framework during the nineteenth century, exception made of the Sociedades Económicas and of very concrete monographic studies. It is necessary to go back to the first years of the past century to find the first descriptions and working papers alluding the agrarian associational framework in Spain. On this respect, José Elías de Molins already did a study entitled La Asociación y Cooperación Agrícolas, published in the year of 1912, in which a recount of confraternities and brotherhoods verified by the Consejo de Castilla in 1770 was done. The first of modern references related to the agrarian organizations, properly speaking, corresponds to Juan Pan-Montojo in his well known work “La naissance des associations agraries en Espagne 1833-1898”, in which the consequences and changes effected in economic power structures were reflected, once the suppression of privileges linked to the land had started, as a consequence of the strengthening of liberalism in a large portion of the state’s farms. After him, came he important works of, among others, Jordi Planas and Germán Rueda. On a comparative level, the formation of agrarian societies with mobilization capacity in other European states certainly took the same amount of time to happen. Thus, the Société des Agriculteurs de France or the Société Nationale et Centrale d’Agriculture, in 1867 and 1871, respectively, came to remind the Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País in Spain...