Neanderthal and stuff...

Coming out of Niaux cave, lamps in hand.

Cave art projection, Musée National de Préhistoire.

Reconstitution of Neandertal life, Musée
National de Préhistoire

Perfectly accurate re-enactment (2): prehistoric
 rites at the Cro-Magnon rock shelter.

No posts in a long time! I've started studying at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and have thereby surrendered both my social and virtual lives. As one of the Prehistory and Quaternary '14 promotion, I've been sent on a trip to Dordogne and the Pyrénées to visit caves, drink wine, eat foie gras and climb up hills in the rain. I don't think I can explain how fantastic and moving it was to stand in a pitch black cave and suddenly see engravings and paintings of mammoths, rhinos, horses and bison appear as the guide lifted his or her lamp and shed light on the cave walls, or to know that Magdalenian adults and children had walked barefoot for hundreds of metres in these cavities (and no, I'm not making stuff up to try and make the story better, researchers did find and date adult and child-sized footprints at Niaux, one of the caves we were lucky enough to visit). So I'm just going to post a couple of pictures instead! Oh and I'd also like to point out that the INRAP (our national preventive archaeology institute) found a mammoth near Paris a few days ago, while excavating a Gallo-Roman site! That's just how random and awesome prehistory can get. [EDIT: funny how things work out, I actually got to do some conservation work on this mammoth! There's an article somewhere on this blog that covers this]

Homo Neandertalensis watching over the valley
from a rock shelter at Les Eyzies.

Bison skeleton, Musée National de Préhistoire,
Les Eyzies-de-Tayac.

Flint debitage explained, Musée National de Préhistoire.

Field-walking with Daisy

You know how it's always people walking their dogs who discover dead bodies? Well, I don't walk my dog early enough in the morning for that. And I can't imagine anyone disposing of a recently- or not so recently- murdered victim in the field behind our house. Anyway, I still get to find stuff when running after the dog. Mostly it's barbecue waste and not-very-exciting pottery. But yesterday, while walking in a freshly ploughed field, I stumbled upon a lovely little flint blade, with a plump percussion bulb, compression rings and maybe even some retouches. I'm a little bit excited about it because apart from a pair of bronze bracelets and a possible Bronze Age barrow, I couldn't find any mentions of prehistoric activity or of lithic finds in Malpas (Cheshire) anywhere. Anything pre-Roman is really quite rare here, as far as we know, although you don't have to go very far out of the parish of Malpas to find possible Neolithic occupations and Iron Age hillforts.

So here's a picture of our little friend. It's just under 4 centimeters long, with a bit of cortex left on the distal end and a few negatives of previously knapped-off bits on the dorsal face. Given the form of the bulb, I'd say it was probably made with a hard hammer. It has an eraillure on the bulb, and it's triangular in section.

You tell me what this little guy was arrested for. Nice mugshot.

We also got a few other bits of flint, one of them largely covered in cortex and exhibiting what looks like part of a striking platform and the negative of compression rings.

Edit 14/05/12: We found another blade today, in a different field not very far away from the one in which we found the first blade. It's very different though, with the bulb and compression rings much more diffuse, possibly suggesting soft-hammer percussion. There are very extensive retouches on the dorsal face, my guess being that they were made using pressure-flaking. This is a really lovely little tool.

Unless there's a hobbyist in the neighbourhood who keeps dropping worked flint everywhere in order to confuse us, Malpas was occupied earlier than we thought.

While walking in the fields, we were quite surprised to see that there were a lot of pebbles everywhere, so we thought we might be in an post-glacial valley. It turns out, as pointed out in a 2003 archaeological assessment of Malpas by the Cheshire County Council, that "at Domesday the town [Malpas] was called Depenbech which means ‘at the deep valley with a stream in it’". I thought that the local substrate, red sandstone, could tell us a little bit more about the geology of the area, as it forms in specific conditions. According to this website, the Sandstone Ridge, made of layers of sandstone and pebble beds, formed in the Triassic era in semi-arid desertic conditions (who would have thought?). Forward to the last glaciation and the region was under a huge ice-sheet which depressed the surface of the earth and, while receding at the end of the Ice Age, dropped loads of boulders and ice-worn pebbles picked up in northern Britain while it was moving southward. Now, the pebbles make perfect sense.

I'm also posting a picture of my dog, because it's totally relevant to this article.

Daisy McWooferson, treasure hunter.

Pâté and roast digger: Gréez-sur-Roc 2010-2011

Digging in France is very different from digging in the UK. It's usually free, with accommodation (or at least a place to pitch a tent) and food thrown in and paid for by whoever's excavating the site. There are less chances of trenches being flooded and more chances of ending up with a sunstroke.  Gréez-sur-Roc (in the Sarthe département) had all of this. Delicious food, starry skies, scorching heat and a couple of locals bordering on insanity.

The vast Neolithic settlement site of Gréez, discovered by local teacher and researcher Jean Jousse, has been excavated every summer from 2003 to 2011 by J.N. Guyodo of the University of Nantes, with E. Mens studying the surface of stones and the traces left by successive detachments of matter and A. Blanchard carrying out her doctoral research. The village itself owes its name to the rocky substrate of the region, with Gréez being derived from 'Grès', meaning 'sandstone'. Because of the presence of sandstone close to the topsoil, the site has never been subjected to deep ploughing and has remained almost intact.

Neolithic people made use of some of the natural cavities in the sandstone, using them and creating new ones to hold the wooden posts of their houses, as illustrated in the following picture. Not all the houses were oriented in the same way and they may have been organised around a central village place.

A huge amount of pottery fragments and flint flakes and tools has been recovered from the site, the distribution of which will be studied thanks to the recording of the location of all material found in the Neolithic strata of the site. Faunal remains have not been preserved because of the acidity of the sandy soil.

Unearthing two 6000 year-old polished axes while digging next to house remains may be one of the best ways to relate to Neolithic people and to get thinking about their work and their daily lives. Maybe for the first time since the end of my childhood, I have been truly amazed again. Among the significant 2010 finds was something that was, at the time, interpreted as a pendant made out of a broken Villeneuve-St-Germain schist bracelet. This VSG influence would then be one of several suggested cultural influences for this site (Chambon and Cerny types of pottery having also been recognised there, as of 2006).

As we students need to be entertained during rainy days, we decided to put our zooarchaeological skills to the test by putting back together the (relatively recent) skeleton of a cat, without much success. Apart from people being thrown into the village's old lavoir (where women used to wash clothes before running water in houses was cool) and from the lovely cities around, one of the major bonuses of this dig was the proximity of a farm where they sold amazing rillettes and foie gras. Nom.

Gate at La Ferté-Bernard (Sarthe). Pic from the town's website.

More information about the site (in French) here and here.