Stone Pages - Archaeo News (France)

Cosquer Cave replica opens this summer

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 15:13:26 +0100

37 years after its discovery, a replica of the prehistoric Cosquer cave is scheduled to open on June 4th, offering a simulated experience of the most inaccessible of the decorated caves ever discovered in France.
At the time the artists were active, the region's climate was much like Norway is now, and the cave entrance was around 80 to 100 metres above sea level. The rise in sea level following the last Ice Age about 19,000 years ago obscured the mouth of the cave, until Henri Cosquer - a professional diver in search of new spots - chanced upon it one day in 1985, 37 metres below sea level.
The chamber is approached through a perilous 175-metre-long submerged corridor which climbs gently. Not until 1991 does Cosquer notice the depictions of horses in the halo of his lamp. Other images are seen in photographs - horses, penguins, bison, hands in negative - all older than the rock art of Lascaux. Since then only scientists have been allowed to enter.

Edited from mProvence (10 January 2022)

Isotope analyses unlock Iron Age secrets

Tue, 21 Dec 2021 10:47:43 +0100

Discovered in 1964, the Rochelongue underwater archaeological site west of Cap d'Agde on the south coast of France is believed to be four small boats dating to about 600 BCE, before permanent Greek settlements appeared in the region. Their cargo included around 800 kilograms of copper ingots, and about 1,700 bronze artefacts made from very pure copper with traces of lead, antimony, nickel, and silver.
For the first time, a team has examined the origins of these Iron Age metal items, showing the composition of different ingots is consistent with Iberian and also eastern Alpine sources, and possibly some Mediterranean sources, providing clues to the coastal mobility and cultural interactions between the Languedoc area and the broader Western Mediterranean basin 2,600 years ago.
The various sizes, shapes and composition of the various ingots show they originated from diverse geographical sources, both continental and maritime. Metallic objects lend themselves to source tracing of geological components, and studies of processing and manufacture. The copper ingots contain low levels of impurities; more than half can be linked to the Iberian Peninsula. Others suggest local and western alpine mining and manufacture, and possibly north-western Sardinia. Local communities would be influenced by the trade for metals and the introduction of foreign cultural goods and practices, especially with seafaring people from the Levant, Aegean, and Greek mainland.
Many artefacts can be seen at the Éphèbe Museum of Underwater Archeology.

Edited from EurekAlert!, PhysORG (13 December 2021)

How to mend a giant menhir

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 20:05:46 +0100

Struck by lightning in 1947, the giant menhir of Kerzerho in Erdeven (Morbihan, France), which threatened to split into several blocks, has been consolidated in an unprecedented rescue operation. The stone is part of Neolithic alignments 8 kilometres northwest of Carnac, in southern Brittany.
Two local sculptors specialised in the restoration of stones - Solen Moreau et Emmanuel Bertrand, who had previously been called in to clean graffiti from menhirs - were trusted with the work.
"It's not like a cathedral," says Solen Moreau. "You can't change the whole stone. You don't touch the outside." He does not seem bothered at the idea of repairing this ancient granite giant, more than 3.50 metres tall.
Scaffolding was erected around the menhir. Straps secured the weakened blocks. The cracks will always be seen. Eight cylindrical holes 32 millimetres in diameter are made at different levels of the menhir using a water-cooled diamond-coated drill bit - no vibration, and no risk of further damage, but eight hours to drill one metre. A metre-long 30 millimetre diameter brass rod weighing about 11 kilos is then inserted into each hole to stabilise the cracks. Brass was chosen for its durability and hold over time. The entrance holes are sealed with lime - no glue or resin, which can migrate into the stone. In 2,000 years, it will still be there, says Solen Moreau.
The entire publicly-funded operation costs about 10,000 euros. "This is probably a world first," says Laure d'Hauteville, conservator of the monument. Scientists specialising in Stonehenge, Galicia and Easter Island are interested in this restoration.

Edited from Ouest France (26 December 2020)

New evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 15:41:40 +0100

The question of ritual burial by non-sapiens humans is a divisive topic: evidence is scanty, possibly partly because if bury they did, it was in shallow graves. Now an international group of researchers has concluded that a Neanderthal toddler was deliberately buried about 41,000 years ago at the La Ferrassie rock shelter in Dordogne, France.
About 2 years old at death, the infant had been placed in a pit dug into an otherwise archaeo-paleontologically sterile sediment layer, Antoine Balzeau of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and colleagues reported in Nature. The child had been part of one of the latest Neanderthal groups in the region.
Dozens of Neanderthal remains have been unearthed in Eurasia, though many were found before the advent of modern archaeological techniques, leading to dubiety about the findings and their interpretation. Confusing the issue, Neanderthal groups exhibited a range of relationship with the dead - possibly burying some, but eating others.
Given the number of bodies found in the La Ferrassie rock shelter, seven so far, some consider it to be a Neanderthal cemetery of a sort. In the newly reported case, the child was identified as Neanderthal based on mitochondrial DNA. Six partial or complete Neanderthal bodies had already been found in the same site about a century ago. They have been subsequently identified as two adults and five children of various ages, an unsurprising proportion given childhood mortality rates in prehistory.
The new paper analyzes the information gathered to date, noting that a return to the site did not recover more bones, though more bones were identified in previously collected material. The researchers could, however, perform new genetic and structural analysis of the remains.
Based on the original notes from decades ago, the researchers conclude that the child's head had been positioned higher than its pelvis. Interestingly, write the researchers, its remains evince a relatively strong inclination to the west, in contrast to the general lie of the sediment and archaeological layers in this sector. In other words, the remains do not follow the natural lie of the land - which argue that its grave had been dug.
Its bones were better preserved than those of animals whose remains were found in the same archaeological layer, indicating that the child's body was buried quickly after death, and the remains show no alterations. This means that the toddler had been deliberately buried around 41,000 years ago. Does it prove that all Neanderthals buried their dead? Certainly not, but it strongly indicates that some did.

Edited from Science Daily (9 December 2020), Haaretz (19 December 2020)

Stone Age artists mesmerised by horses

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:27:29 +0100

Of every four animals drawn upon a cave wall in Stone Age France and Spain, at least one is likely to be a horse, yet these images made thousands of years before humans domesticated horses.
Georges Sauvet, an expert in prehistoric art, has collected more than 4,700 examples of Palaeolithic drawings, paintings and engravings - figurative representations anywhere from 12,000 to 30,000 years old, from what are now France and Spain. Using several statistical analyses, Sauvet shows that horses are portrayed in a noticeably special manner in ancient European art. Nearly 30 percent of all the animals in his collection are horses, and more than three quarters of the sites include at least one image of a horse. While horses and bison together make up roughly half the animals depicted, the horse appears to have a special status. It is found in 44 percent of the panels, and is much more consistently featured than the bison. Usually horses appear larger than lions, rhinos, mammoths, bison, and bears.
Sauvet, who works at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaures in France, says regional variations are mainly stylistic and thematic: "Even the higher number of hind depictions in the Cantabrian region or the 'preference' for mammoth depictions in the Perigord do not undermine the primacy of the horse as the preferred subject. They chose remarkable locations, at high and visible places to draw large horses. It is as if the choice of spectacular locations served to symbolically signify that horse was 'on the top', above the other species." Sauvet thinks one of the clues is the direction the horses face. While most animals are drawn oriented to the left, horses are the only species that is predominantly oriented to the right. Claude Barriere noticed this in 1997. Sauvet says his own findings confirm Barriere's observation.
According to Sauvet, drawing an animal with perfect proportions on the wall or ceiling of a cave is not easy, and the images of horses are particularly accurate in form, dimensions and situation. In fact, a study in 2012 found that prehistoric humans were better at drawing horses than modern artists.
Sauvet regards rock art as linked to mythical stories, supposing horses might have possessed a sort of mythical status.

Edited from Science Alert (23 November 2019)

5,000-year-old bones found during excavation in France

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 17:21:25 +0100

In a rare and exceptional discovery, the well-preserved skeletons of some 50 people dating to the Neolithic period have been found during a preventive archaeology excavation in the small town of Saint-Memmie, around 150 kilometres east of Paris. These people lived nearly 5,000 years ago and are believed to be mainly farmers. Artefacts such as beads of necklaces, canines of animals used as pendants, and pieces of flint were also found nearby.
This discovery is part of a Neolithic hypogea, a collective burial in an underground monument. In Champagne-Ardenne, 160 hypogeus have been discovered but only five could be properly studied. Typical of tombs from the Neolithic, they are either not preserved or very poorly preserved.
According to Inrap, this hypogea dates from the end of the Neolithic, around 3,500 to 3,000 BCE. It takes the form of a human-made cellar or cave, and is particularly represented in the chalky Champagne region between Epernay and the marshes of Saint Gond.
In this example, a sloping corridor of 3.8 metres leads to an antechamber 1.4 meters wide by 1 metre in length, which allows access through a narrow passage to the burial chamber. This chamber is characteristic of the hypogea of the Marne, however the entrance to the monument puzzles archaeologists: was part of the monument elevated, accessible from the ground level of the time, or was the entire tomb underground?
Part of research ahead of the construction of a supermarket in the area, the excavations began in July and are expected to continue until the end of November 2019.

Edited from France Info (15 November 2019)

World's oldest glue used from prehistoric times

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 11:19:02 +0100

Birch bark tar, the oldest glue in the world, was in use for at least 50,000 years, from the Palaeolithic Period up until the time of the Gauls. Made by heating birch bark, it served as an adhesive for hafting tools and decorating objects.
Scientists mistakenly thought it had been abandoned in western Europe at the end of the Iron Age (800-25 BCE) and replaced by conifer resins, around which a full-fledged industry developed during the Roman period. But by studying artefacts that date back to the first six centuries CE through the lens of chemistry, archaeology, and textual analysis, researchers from the CNRS, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis / Université Côte d'Azur, and Inrap have discovered birch tar was being used right up to late antiquity, if not longer.

Edited from EurekAlert!, PhysORG (13 November 2019)

Rare prehistoric stones discovered in central France

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 18:17:30 +0100

In a first of its kind discovery in the region, around 30 prehistoric monoliths and a human skeleton have been found in a 150-metre-long excavation in central France ahead of the widening of the A75 motorway near Veyre-Monton, about 360 kilometres south-southeast of Paris.
This is the first time that menhirs have been found in Auvergne, or anywhere in the centre of France.
The menhirs were toppled into pits and buried some time in prehistory, remaining hidden until now. The stones measure between 1 metre and 1.6 metres, and likely extend beyond the excavation area. They are in a north-south alignment, in the style of megalithic Armorican monuments. Similarly to Carnac, the largest stones atood at the top of the slope towards the north, and the smallest stones closer together towards the south. One group is bordered by another alignment, of which five stones are arranged in a horseshoe curve. Six other regularly spaced blocks form a 15-metre diameter circle. One stone is more sculpted, and largely anthropomorphic - the only example known in the Auvergne. It has a rounded head, rough shoulders, and two small breasts.
The excavation also revealed a burial with the remains of a tall man covered by a quadrangular cairn 14 metres long and 6.5 metres wide. Like the alignments of monoliths, this too had been deliberately erased from the landscape.
There appears to be little to help date the stones precisely, but a series of analyses are planned. Early estimates suggest that the finds could date to the Neolithic or Bronze Age - anywhere from 6,000 to 1,000 BCE.

Edited from France Info (26 August 2019), The Connexion (27 August 2019)

Azilian Culture art found in Southern France

Sun, 01 Sep 2019 21:21:32 +0100

INRAP is the short form name of an impressive organisation called the National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research. Although their origins are in France, they operate worldwide but it is a home grown find which is currently of high interest.
Since April 2018 they have been excavating three prehistoric sites, ranging from Final Palaeolithic to Mesolithic, just outside the commune of Angouleme in the Charente department of France.
A recent find at this site was that of an engraved piece of stone where the shape of a headless horse is clearly visible. The fragment is decorated on both sides and it is thought to be a piece of Azilian art dating to approximately 12,000 BCE, although further detailed investigations are being carried out.
The Azilian Culture stretches back as far as the Early Mesolithic period and covered areas of Northern Spain and Southern France. Other artefacts have been discovered in the same area including fireplaces, heated pebbles, a flint post and animal bones, suggesting a hunting site.

Edited from BBC News (6 June 2019)

Ritual finger amputation may explain missing fingers in Paleolithic people

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 21:13:39 +0100

A trio of researchers at Simon Fraser University in Canada theorizes that ritualistic finger amputation during the Upper Paleolithic explains the number of missing fingers in depictions from that time. Brea McCauley, David Maxwell and Mark Collard outline the reasons for their theory, even as they acknowledge more evidence is required to prove it.
Archeologists studying art on walls by early humans of the Upper Paleolithic have found a lot of pictures of hands with missing fingers - much of the art consists of hand prints or outlines of hands. And a lot of those hands appear to be missing a finger or two, or even three or four.
The researchers with this new effort note that rough conditions could account for missing fingers, particularly frostbite. But it seems like more fingers are missing than would seem likely - people learn not to let their fingers freeze, for example. Also, the missing-fingered art appears in some places that are too warm for widespread frostbite. The sheer numbers suggest something else is going on.
In Grotte de Gargas, in France, for example, 114 out of 231 hand images have missing fingers. In another cave in France, the average is even higher, 28 out of 49. The researchers also note that hand paintings on the cave walls at Grotte de Gargas appear quite flat, ruling out the possibility that some fingers were simply held back as the print was being made. They also looked at history books and found that 121 groups of people living on different continents have been found to engage in finger amputation rituals.
The researchers note that finger amputation rituals could take many forms - some early people might have done it as part of a religious ceremony or as a way to mourn the loss of a loved one. Others may have had it done to them as part of a punishment ritual. There is no way yet to prove that such rituals occurred, or that intentional cutting of fingers was carried out by people of the Upper Paleolithic, but the researchers contend that there is enough evidence to warrant further investigation.

Edited from PhysORG (4 December 2018)

Sound-reflecting rock shelters attracted ancient artists

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 13:02:17 +0100

Researchers say that members of early farming communities in in the central Mediterranean preferred to paint images in rock shelters where sounds bounced off walls and into the surrounding countryside. Archaeologist Margarita Diaz-Andreu of the University of Barcelona and colleagues report that in landscapes with many potential rock art sites, "the few shelters chosen to be painted were those that have special acoustic properties."
Diaz-Andreu's team studied two rock art sites generally dated to between approximately 6,500 and 5,000 years ago. In southeastern France, at the kilometer-long cliff site of Baume Brune, only eight of the forty-three naturally formed cavities in the cliff contain paintings, which include treelike figures and horned animals. On the east coast of Italy, in the Valle d'Ividoro, at an 800-metre-long section of a gorge, only three of eleven natural shelters contain painted images.
The researchers popped balloons in front of each rock-shelter, recording the sound waves from various locations and distances. Three-dimensional slow-motion depictions of echoes revealed that at both sites, shelters with rock paintings displayed better echoing properties than undecorated shelters, and that shelters with the best echoes had the highest number of paintings.
In a separate study of paintings in northern Finland dated to between around 7,200 and 3,000 years ago, music archaeologist Riitta Rainio of the University of Helsinki and her colleagues found that echoes from steep rock cliffs bordering three lakes also attracted ancient artists. She and her colleagues recorded from boats on the lakes.
Similarly, at the Grotte de Niaux in southwestern France, archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England observes that many roughly 14,000 to 12,000 year-old animal drawings and engravings are concentrated in a cathedral-like chamber where sounds echo loudly.

Edited from Science News (26 June 2017)

Pointillist technique on engravings discovered in France

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 08:58:38 +0100

Aurignacian artists who decorated several newly rediscovered limestone blocks 38,000 years ago used small dots to create the illusion of a larger image - the same technique employed by Pointillist painters in the late 19th century.
Images on the stones include mammoths and horses, adding to previous isolated discoveries from the Grotte Chauvet, such as a rhinoceros formed by the application of dozens of dots first painted on the palm of the hand and then transferred to the cave wall.
Earlier this year, excavation team leader and New York University anthropologist Randall White and his colleagues reported finding the image of an aurochs - some of the earliest known graphic imagery found in Western Eurasia. Now they have found a woolly mammoth in the same style in a rock shelter of the same period known as Abri Cellier, near the previous find-site of Abri Blanchard.
Abri Cellier has long been on archeologists' list of major rock art sites attributed to the European Aurignacian. Excavations in 1927 yielded 15 engraved and/or pierced limestone blocks - a key point of reference for the study of Aurignacian art in the region.
In 2014 White and his colleagues returned to Abri Cellier seeking a better understanding of its archaeological sequence and relationship to other Aurignacian sites, but nothing prepared them for the discovery of the 16 stone blocks, 15 of which had been left behind by the 1927 excavators in case they might have something inscribed on them.
With these and other finds, White and his team have increased our known sample of the earliest graphic arts in southwestern France by 40 percent over the past decade.

Edited from EurekAlert!, PhysOrg, Popular Archaeology (24 February 2017)

38,000 year old rock art discovered in France

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 16:24:23 +0100

In the summer of 2012, a group of archaeologists discovered what could be one of the oldest examples of art in Europe when they turned over a broken block of limestone on the floor of a rock shelter in southwestern France.
The slab comes from a partially collapsed rock shelter called Abri Blanchard. It reveals the image of an aurochs and dozens of small dots, and was decorated by Aurignacians - the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Europe. The engraving is about 38,000 years old.
The 20 metre long shelter is near the small town of Sergeac, about 500 kilometres south-southwest of Paris, in a region famous for some of Europe's oldest examples of cave art. Several other carved slabs were discovered at Abri Blanchard a century ago.
New York University anthropologist Randall White, a co-author of the study who led recent excavations at the site, says the discovery sheds light on regional patterning of art and ornamentation at a time when humans were just starting to spread across the continent.
Many early artistic representations from this region have been interpreted as vulvas, but the artists at Abri Blanchard chose an array of artistic subjects, from horses and cats to geometric designs.
In addition to the aurochs carving, the researchers found hundreds of stone tools and tool fragments, as well as animal bones, mostly from reindeer. They also found an ivory bead and a pierced fox tooth.
Aurignacian images of aurochs have been found at other sites, such as Chauvet Cave, about 350 kilometres east-southeast of Abri Blanchard. Aligned dots have also been seen before on Aurignacian objects such as mammoth-tooth plaques and ivory pendants, but researchers describe the combination of this design with an animal figure as "exceptional".
The discovery of fits into the patterns researchers usually see in the earliest European art: broad shared features, with some regional quirks.
White says: "This pattern fits well with social geography models that see art and personal ornamentation as markers of social identity at regional, group and individual levels."

Edited from LiveScience (30 January 2017)

Neanderthals associated with Chatelperronian tool technology

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 12:13:45 +0100

An international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has demonstrated that Neanderthals were responsible for the Chatelperronian, a transitional tool-making industry from central and southwestern France and northern Spain.
Transitional industries are a key to understanding the process by which modern humans replaced Neanderthals in western Eurasia at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, between 50,000 and 40,000 years ago. The older Mousterian industry of the Middle Palaeolithic in Europe can be clearly attributed to Neanderthals, and the later Upper Palaeolithic assemblages to modern humans. The makers of the Chatelperronian industry has long been disputed.
Chatelperronian assemblages from the widely separated Grotte du Renne and Saint Cesaire archaeological sites in France have yielded well-identified Neanderthal remains. At the Grotte du Renne, 200 kilometres southeast of Paris, Chatelperronian layers also produced sophisticated bone tools and body ornaments.
Using peptide mass fingerprinting, the team identified 28 additional hominin specimens among previously unidentifiable bone fragments at the Grotte du Renne. It is thought the bone fragments most likely represent the remains of a single, immature, breastfed individual, with radiocarbon dating consistent with Neanderthal ancestry.
Study co-author and University of York Professor Matthew Collins says: "These methods open up new avenues of research throughout Late Pleistocene contexts in which hominin remains are scarce and where the biological nature of remains is unclear due to ancient DNA not being preserved."
Professor Jean-Jacques Hublin, study co-author and Director of the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology says: "The process of replacement of archaic local populations by modern humans in Eurasia is still poorly understood, as the makers of many palaeolithic tool-kits of this time period remain unknown. This type of research now allows us to extract unrecognisable human fragments out of large archaeological assemblages and to revisit the mode and the tempo of this major event in human evolution with fresh material."

Edited from Sci News (23 September 2016)

People consumed milk and cheese 9,000 years ago

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 18:54:49 +0100

Researchers analysing more than 500 pottery vessels from 82 sites in the northern Mediterranean dating from the seventh to fifth millennia BCE found that dairy farming was popular in some areas, but not all. The eastern and western parts of the northern Mediterranean commonly practiced dairy farming - including parts of modern-day Spain, France, and Turkey - but northern Greece did not. There, meat production was the main activity.
The varying landscape in the northern Mediterranean likely influenced what sort of animals the Neolithic people domesticated. Rugged terrains are more suitable for sheep and goats, while open well-watered landscapes are better suited for cattle.
The new analysis supports the team's earlier work showing that milk use was highly regionalised in the Near East in the seventh millennium BCE. Information about ancient dairy use and meat production can help scientists understand what factors drove the domestication of cud-chewing animals.
According to Cynthianne Spiteri - junior professor of archaeometry at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, and the study's lead researcher - dairying began with the onset of agriculture, and likely helped early farmers. "[Milk] is likely to have played an important role in providing a nourishing and storable food product, which was able to sustain early farmers, and consequently, the spread of farming in the western Mediterranean," Spiteri says.
Study researcher Oliver Craig, a professor of archaeology at the University of York, says organic remnants in the pots show that Neolithic people certainly exploited milk, and suggest that they were transforming milk into products such as yogurt and cheese, to remove the lactose which some people are unable to digest.
Craig explains: "We know that much of the world's population today are still intolerant to lactose, so it is very important to know at what point people in the past were exposed to it and how long they have had to adapt to it."

Edited from LiveScience (17 November 2016)