Le gisement rupestre de Siega Verde, Salamanque: Une vision de synthèse

The Paleolithic shelter Art in the open air of Siega Verde, Salamanca, is the unitary group better endowed with paleolithic shelter manifestations in the bleakness of the whole Iberian Peninsula. Its study, consequence of more than 10 years of works on the land, has culminated with the recent publication of a complete monograph. In the following lines, we intend to synthesize the content of that, with special emphasis in the internal analysis of the representations and in their relationship with its cultural immediate environment, the Upper Paleolithic of the Castilian Plateau. The results of so long investigation process suppose a new interpretation way, not only of the own site, but also of the whole Paleolithic shelter phenomenon inside the Peninsula, and in a more general environment, of the graphic system of the European Upper Paleolithic.     

Roc-La-Tour I, le site des Esprits : L’art du Magdalénien VI à Monthermé (Ardennes)

For 100 or 200 years during the late Bölling this site in the Ardenne, with its fine outlook, was the summer camp for a small group (10-15 persons) from the Paris Basin. No bone has been preserved (acid soil). Each of the four levels corresponds to at least five to 10 visits. The visitors were attracted to the site by the viewpoint, the dry ground and the presence of ochre and schist. Thousands of plaques and plaquettes were used and broken up before and after engraving. There are more engraved pieces than burins and borers: the visitors must have engraved every day. The engravings include five palimpsests, 32 tangled groups of incisions (« tangles ») and 75 fragmentary images of animals and human beings, with the same menagerie as in the South-West of France; a large majority of the figurative subjects are shown only partially, or merely roughly sketched; there are several human beings and one vulva. The 410 abstract signs can be classified into 14 categories, mostly different from those found in the South-West, and there are 215 groups of parallel lines. These engraved, smoothed or shaped plaquettes, together with 123 deposits of ochre, all contrast with the lack of similar finds on sites in the Paris Basin which are, however, 10 times richer as far as tools are concerned. There was an evolutionary course in the engravings (figures and signs): inception, development, acme and the start of a decline. This site complements those in the Paris Basin and the Ardenne left by the same persons; it is an integral, inseparable part of the remains of the same group of human beings.     

La variabilité graphique du Molí del Salt (Vimbodí, Catalogne, Espagne) et l'art mobilier de la fin du Paléolithique supérieur à l'est de la Péninsule Ibérique

The Upper Paleolithic of Catalonia has been so far characterized by a very weak presence of artistic representations. This scarcity was especially surprising if we take into account the huge number of discoveries from other zones of the Iberian Peninsula (Valencia, the Cantabrian region). In this paper we present four objects of portable art found at the Molí del Salt site (Vimbodí, Conca de Barberà, Tarragona). Below a mesolithic layer, dated to 8 ka BP, there is an Upper Magdalenian sequence with several dates between 10.8 and 12.5 ka BP. These magdalenian levels have yielded four plaques of schist with engravings, including several animal figurines and one human representations. Once the objects are described, we will place them in the context of the portable art from the Late Upper Paleolithic of Mediterranean Spain. From these data, the chronocultural successions based on the Upper Magdalenian-Microlaminar Epipaleolithic distinction will be discussed.     

Nouvelles recherches sur l’identité culturelle et stylistique de la grotte Chauvet et sur sa datation par la méthode du C

The discovery of Chauvet cave, at Vallon-Pont-d’Arc (Ardèche), in 1994, was an important event for our knowledge of palaeolithic parietal art as a whole. Its painted and engraved figures, thanks to their number (425 graphic units), and their excellent state of preservation, provide a documentary thesaurus comparable to that of the greatest sites known, and far beyond what had already been found in the group of Rhône valley caves (Ardèche and Gard). But its study – when one places it in its natural regional, cultural and thematic framework – makes it impossible to see it as an isolated entity of astonishing precocity. This needs to be reconsidered, and the affinities that our research has brought to light are clearly incompatible with the very early age which has been attributed to it. And if one extends this examination to the whole of the Franco-Cantabrian domain, the conclusion is inescapable: although Chauvet cave displays some unique characteristics (like every decorated cave), it belongs to an evolved phase of parietal art that is far removed from the motifs of its origins (known from art on blocks and on shelter walls dated by stratigraphy to the Aurignacian, in France and Cantabrian Spain). The majority of its works are therefore to be placed, quite normally, within the framework of the well-defined artistic creations of the Gravettian and Solutrean. Moreover, this phase of the Middle Upper Palaeolithic (26,000–18,000) coincides with a particularly intensive and diversified local human occupation, unknown in earlier periods and far less dense afterwards in the Magdalenian. A detailed critique of the treatment of the samples subjected to AMS radiocarbon dating makes it impossible to retain the very early age (36,000 cal BP) attributed by some authors to the painted and engraved figures of Chauvet cave.     

Chronologie de l’art Mégalithique ibérique : C et contextes archéologiques

From the beginning of our investigation we found the necessity of locating the Megalithic Iberian art in the chronology that came off of the well-known data in the peninsula at the end of the 1980s and of those that manifested the Atlantic long sequences. Then, we argue the dates obtained in the deposits of decorated dolmens to endorse the chronological similarity between architectures and decorations. To it, we could add decorations in the nonvisible area of some slabs that they even aimed a bigger antiquity. With that material, we organize our first chronological proposal for the Megalithic Iberian art, in which we assumed dates of fifth millennium lime BC for the oldest decorations, in consonance with the construction of the first megaliths. Moreover, it would be right so much in the supposedly classic areas as in the less favoured sectors for the investigation: the Interior, the South and the West of the Iberian peninsula. In successive works we are configuring a hypothesis on its development and chronology that offers more and more confirmations. The documentation of AMS dates on megalithic paintings, a unique case in the megalithic European art, comes to consolidate the chronology of the megalithic Iberian art. With all the data obtained in the last twenty years, we are arrived to the moment for establishing a sequence to adjust their times, to value complex situations in the decoration of the monuments and to confirm a long chronology that arrives practically as a residual way to Iron Age.     

Application d'une méthode d'analyse du territoire à partir de la situation des marqueurs graphiques à l'intérieur de la Péninsule Ibérique : le Tage International

This paper, analyses the graphic evidences of the boundaries of Tagus between Spain and Portugal from the perspective of the model defended by our team. This model proposes the existence of the relationship between graphic markers: paintings, engravings in the open air, decorations over dolmens and menhirs, understood as a compact ideological group fixed in the organization social system of European producing people and metallurgical that occupying this landscape. This argument attempt to verify the possibilities of applying a pre-defined model in an area in which have been developed investigation models, focused to study megalithic monuments, menhirs, habitational areas, paints and engravings that shows symbolic expressions of the tradition to justify the property of rich areas in natural resources in what metallurgical have a remarkable importance.     

C et style: La chronologie de l’art pariétal à l’heure actuelle

The chronology of the Paleolithic art proposed by A. Leroi-Gourhan had a strong installation among the specialists until his death, in the years 1980s of the last century. After that the system SMA of direct dating began to be applied producing some disagreements and a supposed revolution against the chronological-stylistic procedure that has been overvalued. There are not so many disagreements and when they appear, they can tinge the French author's procedure and to improve it partly. If we take it with enough flexibility and aperture, it continues being a non perfect model, but useful and valid to organize the graphs of the Upper Paleolithic whose systematic should continue based on the material documentation, in the represented forms and in all the technical procedures that allow to specify and to improve our chronological arguments.     

Nouvelles découvertes d'art rupestre au Mato Grosso (Cidade de Pedra, Rondonópolis, Brésil)

Since 1983, Professor Agueda Vilhena-Vialou is conducting in Mato Grosso (Brazil) the French-brasilian archeological mission Fossil men and their paleo-environments in the Paraná basin. Its goal is the study of the first prehistoric settlements of Latin America's heart, in their economic, social, cultural and symbolic dimensions. Thanks to the complementary and comparative analysis of the habitats, the regional settlements and the rock art, our research targets a more precise definition of territories and cultures proper of the prehistoric human groups from the South of the actual Mato Grosso state. The study of rock art, the most revealing aspect of symbolic behaviours, is one of the strongest programs inside our multidisciplinary team. Today, thanks to systematic prospections led along the Rio Vermelho (between Pantanal swamp at West and Rondonópolis city at East), a hundred rock art sites (walls, shelters and caves), decorated with signs, animals and humans, have been discovered, and, for the most of them, studied. These figures are painted, engraved and more rarely sculpted. Along those pages, the author is presenting the preliminary analysis of ten new rock art sites, recently identified in a cliff on the right bank of the Vermelho River. He starts a comparative study with the sites of the Cidade de Pedra and of close micro basin, from the left bank of the River. This research is showing the symbolic identities, both common and specific, proper to different territories of this major rock art region of Brazil, which is divided in several areas and micro territories, shared but autonomous.     

Des crosses transformées en haches dans l’art néolithique armoricain : l’exemple du signe D de Dissignac (Saint-Nazaire, Loire-Atlantique, France)

A large number of Armorican engravings (Brittany, France) have been made by “pecking”. Each hammerstone impact caused the removal of a few square millimetres of rock, leaving distinctive groove called “flake negative”. The flake negatives are an authentic “signature of percussion” which informs us about the gestures employed by the engraver. The study of the signatures of percussion makes it possible for us to identify cases of superposition or to show as yet unperceived modifications of the engraved signs or transformations that have been carried out. For example, the technological study of Dissignac (Saint-Nazaire, Loire-Atlantique) showed the case of a crook transformed into a hafted axe. This method thus represents a new way in the development of the relative chronology of neolithic engravings in Armorica.     

Indices de fréquentation humaine dans les grottes à ours au Paléolithique moyen final: L’exemple de la Caverna Generosa dans les Préalpes lombardes, Italie

Already known like a palaeontological site for the study of Ursus spelaeus, Caverna Generosa also records ephemeral traces of human visits during the late Middle Palaeolithic. The cave opens at an altitude of 1450 m on the steep southern slope of the Monte Generoso Massif between the Lugano and the Como lakes and forms a complex group of narrow galleries and inner chambers. Sedimentological and palaeontological data and radiocarbon dates place both the cave-bear and the human frequentations in the first part of the isotopic stage 3 with climatic conditions shifting from cool and dry to more temperate and wet. Environment progressively changed from scarcely arboreal to arboreal-brush with small open spaces. Few flakes and Levallois flakes have been recovered scattered in the sediment and affected in most cases by intense postdepositional alteration. These items testify incursions of mousterian groups equipped with end-products and radiolarite flakes struck from blocks provisioned at lower locations southwards. End-products, namely Levallois flakes, prove that lithic reduction sequences were spatiotemporally fractionated in the covered territory. Conversely, it cannot be excluded a priori that sublocal radiolarite has been chipped at the entrance of the cave or at the very close surroundings for extraction of rudimental tools for immediate use. It is worth to mention that the small chert slabs in the Moltrasio limestone which crop throughout the cave walls were totally ignored. Caverna Generosa can be viewed as a refugia-location used in function of more or less constrained factors strongly influenced by high-altitude and bioclimatic situations. This type of site might well be integrated within the seasonal movements of humans in the western Lombard Pre-Alps area.     

Nouvel essai de classification et de structuration des motifs des gravures rupestres du Haut Atlas (vallée de l'Ourika, Maroc)

We have been sometimes forced to notice that there are forgotten rupestral arts: until recently, they were only studied by explorers or informed travellers and are rarely reported in the scientific literature. This is in part the case of engravings in the Moroccan High Atlas to which I have devoted my research (Ezziani, 2002, 2004a, 2004b). J Malhomme is among the people who were most invested in their investigation. He spent ten years in noting and collecting a considerable number of engravings: more than one thousand figures dispersed on the sides of the Atlas in places of difficult access at more than 2000 masl. He published many papers about his discoveries, which led to the publication of a remarkable corpus in two parts (Malhomme, 1959-1961). However, this corpus is far from being exhaustive. Recently, A. Rodrigue carried out new and excellent drawings within his research activity (1996). He added to the corpus of Malhomme a large number of figures discovered by A. Simoneau (1967, 1968, 1970), A. Jodin (1964, 1966) (two other researchers who have been closely interested in the High Atlas engravings) and himself, but unfortunately some engravings were damaged: whole flagstones have disappeared, so that the original drawings from Malhomme still remain very useful. All these data constituted the documentation base of my own work. In this paper, first I review some classification methods, then I propose my own and point out the inherent difficulties in this task. I conclude with a proposal for an outline of the structure of the High Atlas engravings.     

Découverte d’un site d’art rupestre en Cyrénaïque (Libye) : Kaf Tahr

In April 2009, a new rock art site was discovered in Libya. Kaf Tahr is situated in Cyrenaica, in the Djebel Akhdar (the “green mountain”). This new site with engravings displays several interests. Firstly, it is only the third rock art site discovered - or at least published - in Cyrenaica. Secondly, this rock shelter is the only one that had shown engravings belonging to at least two different chronological periods, the first one being very probably prehistoric, and the second, post-prehistoric. Finally, the engraving of a man (with a sword and a shield) and the engraving of a horse are the first discovered in the area. These two engravings could have been realized in the protohistoric period. This period is well-known in the Libyan Fezzan (“libyco-berberian period” or “horse period”) but it has never been defined in Cyrenaica. Owing to the lack of research, the long period separating the end of Prehistory from the beginning of the greek colonization is hitherto totally unknown. If these engravings would belong to this period, they would be the first elements attesting of a metal work and a horse domestication in Cyrenaica before the historic period.     

Gravures et abstraction: Les gravures non figuratives de Roc-la-Tour I, le schiste gravé des Beaux-Sarts et les progrès de l’abstraction durant la Préhistoire et l’Histoire

Beyond the 75 animal and human pictures, the 491 Magdalenian engraved plaquettes bear 410 abstract signs, in 14 different types, among which eight were unknown up to now in South-Western France, (more than 130 cases). Some examples of all those signs are shown. Besides there are 213 groups of parallel lines. At “Les Beaux-Sarts”, less than 2 m from the hut described in 2003, another human excavation (maybe a tomb?) delivered a schist plaquette with 94 parallel lines carved on its surface, the lines appear as three groups of 14, 7 (or 8?) and 24 (or 28?) lines and one group of 17 (or 18?) oblique lines, with various secondary lines. Five thousand years before the cerebral center of precise calculation was at the beginning of its formation, this piece, out of the bases of which calculation might be subdivided, cannot be considered as the evidence that they were able to count. The author analyses the affective mental possibilities proved by those elements and puts them apart from the rational progress in the abstraction possibilities of the human brain, which occurred later all through ten thousand years.     

Nouvelle approche de l’art rupestre de l’Atlas saharien : les figurations de la période tardive

Figurations in Atlas have been studied numerous times, namely by Flamand and Frobenius between 1891 and 1914, by Vaufrey in 1939 and by Lhote between 1955 and 1970. And finally there were Iliou’s¹ and Hachid’s theses in the 1980s and Amara’s thesis in 2001. The study of the Atlas figurations discovered since 1847 brought new data on the engravings from the recent period. The originality of the engravings lies in the appearance of new themes, which had been unknown until yet. The presence of metal weapons figures enriches the records of the Atlas rock Art. The alphabetical signs, another new theme, give an identity to this Art. The work undertaken in this vast region raises the problem of the persistency of the Neolithic culture. All the figurations show some aspects of the evolution, which become permanent, mostly at the end of the recent period.     

Témoins du froid. La faune dans l’art rupestre paléolithique de l’intérieur péninsulaire

It is our intention to analyse the environmental significance of the Palaeolithic artistic representations existing in the inner areas of the Iberian Peninsula. The fauna is used to create chronological and climatical criteria to affirm the condition of the castillan plateau during the last glaciation. In our opinion, it is dangerous to use the isolated animals in order to talk about coldness or heat situation because they reflect the cultural selection of their authors more than the ambiental reality. Neither the animals called thermometer nor the euritherm ones are solely represented in the tempered moments. Moreover, we have almost a no animal representation than artistic during the last finiglacial period in the peninsular interior. It means probably that the artistic representations are mainly cultural signs, which change for cultural reasons and not properly climatic ones within a general reality of glacial environment.     

Codes mythiques du Mézinien

Colonized by mammoths, the Eurasian steppe witnessed the birth of religious performances that are based on the reciprocation of life with the human populations moving apace. Plastic art codes attest to this balanced equilibrium with an up-to-present untamed environment, which is still in evidence among some Siberian peoples and the Saami (Lapps) in Europe. Such persistence can be seen as direct legacies and displays an environment that allows a range of attitudes towards animals incompatible with the notion of animal “domestication” as we commonly associate to the European Neolithic.     

La grotte ornée Mayenne-Sciences (Thorigné-en-Charnie, Mayenne) : grotte-limite aux marges du monde anté-magdalénien

The decorated cave of Mayenne-Sciences (Thorigné-en-Charnie, Mayenne) is one of the eight caves or shelters attributed to the Upper Paleolithic in the North of France, with the caves of Gouy and Orival in Normandy, Boutigny, Le Croc-Marin and Les Trois Pignons in the Essonne Department, the Grotte du Cheval and the Grande Grotte of Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy. There are about 50 stylised representations in this cave, the chrono-cultural attribution is rather difficult because the archeological context is poor and the site of the cave excentric, far from the great areas like Perigord. After a short statement of what you may guess about the style of the representations in Mayenne-Sciences we try to draw up a synthesis of the sites of parietal art and furniture near Mayenne-Sciences, and to analyse further how to place Mayenne-Sciences within a figurative tendance flourishing during the ante-magdalenian era in Europe which we propose to call art de la silhouette. We show that the style of Mayenne-Sciences is not 50 particular, but that the originality of the style may be explained by the isolation of the cave at the border of the main prehistorical cultural tendances, as this is the case for other decorated caves, we list up. In conclusion this leads us to define the concept of grotte-limite (border-cave), I mean a decorated cave which represents the vision at distance, with caricatural character or not, of the parietal art of one specific region, as for example you must admit that there are similitude’s between Mayenne-Sciences and the caves of Pech-Merle and Cougnac, in the Lot Department.     

Baume Flandin et Abri du Maras : deux exemples de débitage laminaire du début du Pléistocène supérieur dans la Vallée du Rhône (sud-est, France)

Assemblages with blades are rare in the south of Europe and most of them are dated from the isotopic stages 4 and 3. The blades are, otherwise, often produced on Levallois cores with unipolar and bipolar methods. According to the sites, the blades are more or less retouched as different kinds of tools. However, there are no specific links between this blank and the tools, and never between the artefacts and the fauna remains (activities). The hypothesis of traditions or needs among time and space are asked without answer, while the blades are present in the north of Europe and the Near East in far older periods. Several sites can be considered to describe the variability of the technical behaviour and the archaeological context of the blades in south-east France, extending to north Italy. The two sites, Abri du Maras and Baume Flandin, located in the middle Rhône valley, yield evidence of a laminar debitage linked to a Levallois method and a “direct” method. The technical choices used in the two sites are accorded to the specificity of the laminar assemblages in the southern Europe.     

Les derniers Homo heidelbergensis et leurs descendants les néandertaliens : datation des sites d’Orgnac 3, du Lazaret et de Zafarraya

This article presents the dating results recently obtained on three archaeological sites in Europe. At Orgnac 3 (Ardèche, France) from where the last Homo heidelbergensis fossils are associated with the first evidence of levallois technique, two speleothem formations from the 5b–6–7^th layers were U-Th dated with MC-ICPMS, giving an age range of 319–255 ka (2σ) (MIS 8–9), while the volcanic ash-bearing second layer was dated by ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar, obtaining a preliminary date of 308.2 ± 6.8 ka (2σ). The combined ESR/U-Th dating of red deer enamel teeth from Lazaret cave (Alpes-Maritimes, France) attributed ages of 120–190 ka to the Acheulean and pre-Mousterian layers (MIS 6), which is in agreement with previous TIMS U-Th dates between 108 and 44 ka on calcite samples from the overlying TRA trench (MIS 5, 4, 3). At Zafarraya (Andalousie, Espagne), a number of ¹⁴C measurements on charcoal samples as well as combined ESR/U-Th dates on Capra and Equus dental enamels assigned the Mousterian artefacts and neandertalian fossils-bearing deposits an age interval between 42 and 34 ka (MIS 3).     

Éléments d'une analyse sémiologique des gravures rupestres du Haut Atlas (vallée de l'Ourika, Maroc)

The semiological study of a set of rock engravings such as the one in the Haut Atlas would consist in studying the graphic elements within their context to determine their mutual relations, because such relations are meaningful. Some details could be signs to which we could attach a conventional meaning. But, being unable to identify these conventional signs by their meaning, we must look for similarities between the figures themselves. Indeed, the repetition of some relations will provide constitutive elements of the global meaning. Unfortunately, ignoring the relative positions of the figures, I can only give some indications about what such a study should entail. So, I focus on one hand on the attributes of the figures, which are, in any case, identity marks, and on the other hand, on the context of the figures, that is the graphics around the figure, in order to outline the likely semantic field and the actions, actual or symbolic, in which they are involved.