XClose

Human Evolution @ UCL

Home
Menu

A review of the latest research at the Etiolles, northern France, during the Magdalenian Period

13 November 2018

Since the revolutionary application of Eastern European planimetric field techniques (see Gallay, 2003; Soulier, 2015) and, more broadly, of 'palethnological' methods to French sites, notably Pincevent in the late '60s (Leroi-Gourhan and Brézillon, 1966, 1972), the excavation and study of open air sites have greatly contributed to a finer understanding of the day-to-day life of Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers.

Visit of the prehistoric site of Étiolles during the National Archaeology Days 2015 in Étiolles, France Central to André Leroi-Gourhan's new ethnographically-oriented perspective (Leroi-Gourhan, 1936) were a handful of open-air Magdalenian camp sites from the Paris Basin, such as Marsangy, Verberie, Étiolles, and of course, Pincevent.

For the past 40 years, these few sites have served as major reference points for the Magdalenian, along with other open air sites discovered in the Paris Basin (such as Cepoy Allain et al., 1978, Marolles-sur-Seine (Alix et al., 1993; Bridault et al., 1994; Valentin et al., 1999), and Mareuil-sur-Cher (Kildea et al., 2008)) (Fig. 1) as well as elsewhere in Western Europe (such as Champréveyres-Monruz (Leesch, 1997), Gönnersdorf (Jöris et al., 2011), and Andernach (Bosinski, 1995; Bosinski and Bosinski, 2007)), most of them linked to the development of systematic preventive archaeology in the '90s. The most exceptional of these sites provided well-preserved occupations along with clear stratigraphic sequences, thus offering opportunities for very detailed studies at the scale of a short-term hunter-gatherer settlement. At these sites, the association between high-resolution excavation techniques, involving the uncovering of extensive horizontal surfaces, and integrated technological and spatial approaches allow for new fields of investigation at the time, such as the spatial organization of camp sites, resource management within the group, and social and economic purposes that lay behind technological behaviours (see for example Debout et al., 2012). These palethnological perspectives have also been adapted and applied to older chronological periods (examples in France include Ormesson (Bodu et al., 2014; Lacarriere et al., 2015), Mareuil-sur-Cher (Kildea and Lang, 2011; Kildea et al., 2013), Renancourt (Paris et al., 2017), Régismont-le-Haut (Anderson et al., this issue), La Picardie (Klaric et al., 2011) or La Folie (Bourguignon et al., 2002)).

(Re)occupation: Following a Magdalenian group through three successive occupations at Étiolles

Elisa Caron-Laviolette, Olivier Bignon-Lau, Monique Olive

DOI: 10.1016/j.quaint.2018.10.043