Mas Aguilhon, a new milestone for our knowledge of the Gravettian in south-eastern France
Mas Aguilhon, un nouveau jalon pour la connaissance du Gravettien dans le Sud-Est de la France
Résumé
The site of Mas Aguilhon is located in the middle Rhône Valley in the southern Ardèche region. It was discovered in 1963 by R. Gilles, an amateur prehistorian in Saint-Marcel-d’Ardèche. The lithic assemblage, recovered during a survey and test excavation, has remained largely unpublished (Combier, 1967; Gilles, 1994). In this article,
I present my recent typo-technological study of this assemblage.
The lithic assemblage comprises 80 tools and 560 flaking by-products. Among the tools, the weapon elements include shouldered points, Gravettian micro-points, backed bladelets, sometimes truncated or bi-truncated, and retouched bladelets. The rest of the toolkit comprises a majority of relatively short end-scrapers, diverse burins, including Noailles burins, truncated blades, one pointed blade, and bipolar flakes (pièce esquillée).
The main objective of the bladelet debitage was to produce blanks for backed bladelets, microgravettes and retouched bladelets. This production is partly continuous with that of the small blades used as blanks for shouldered points, Noailles burins and truncated blades. Some pieces are twisted and have tapered, sometimes asymmetrical distal ends, associating a straight edge and convergent skewed edge. On the small blades, this convergent skewed distal end sometimes corresponds to a semi-abrupt side (Type A). Other bladelets and small blades are more regular, sometimes thick and do not converge distally (Type B). The last type consists of thinner, wider and irregular small blades with a distal convergence and no abrupt side (Type C). These types are not associated with any particular tools. Rather, they served as blanks for the different weapon element types, as well as for all types of domestic tools.
Most of the small blades were made via a convergent unidirectional flaking scheme and have an oblique intersection plane at their proximal end, favoring an oblique abrupt or semi-abrupt convergent side at the distal end. The horizontal plane of the flaking surface is polyhedral, associating a curved surface with a flatter one. Thicker bladelets and small blades were detached from the curved surface, while thinner, wider and often more irregular pieces were detached from
the flat surface. The striking platform is plain, with varying obliquities relative to the flaking surface, one transverse,
the other lateral at the flanks, favoring off-axis detachments that result in a torsion of the blanks and/or a distal convergence.
This scheme enabled the production of three blank types that may have been advantageous for the production
of small Type A blades. There’s a modality with two striking platforms that enabled the production of the three blank
types but favored thicker and straighter Type B blanks due to its more curved volume.
Another modality, with a facial exploitation of the volume, also produced the three blank types but favored thinner and
wider Type C products detached from the frontal surface of the volume. Another more modality also produced occasional
bladelets, many with an abrupt side.
The objective of this scheme was to obtain weapon element blanks, consisting of the most regular blades, and domestic
tool blanks, corresponding to the small blades, some of which are regular, or technical pieces, resulting from the repair
of overshot flakes or pieces from the side of the core, for example.
A second scheme corresponds to the detachment of small rectilinear, tapered bladelets from the sharp edge of a flake.
These bladelets have no abrupt side and their length ranges from 10 to 25 mm. These pieces are absent from the assemblage.
While the Mas Aguilhon site can be attributed to a Gravettian technocomplex with Noailles burins, the region lacks
a regional reference base that would enable a more precise chrono-cultural attribution. In the Ardèche, there is no
stratigraphy that sufficiently documents the Early Upper Paleolithic, nor the Gravettian in particular, for which no
chronological facies have been described.
A broad perspective of the occupations considered as Gravettian has nonetheless been proposed (Onoratini et al., 1999;
Onoratini & Combier, 1999). Noailles burins are sometimes present in the assemblages of cave sites in the Ardèche
gorges, such as Le Marronier, Le Figuier, La Grotte aux Points and Baou-de-la-Sello (Onoratini et al., 1999; Madelain,
1976; Monney, 2018; Gilles, 1994), as well as Chassezac, and the Abris des Pêcheurs (Lhomme, 1976 and 1977). The
sites that have been dated are mainly decorated ones, beginning with the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc Cave, whose second
occupation phase has been attributed to the Middle Gravettian (Quilès et al. 2016, Delannoy & Geneste, 2020). On a
broader scale, despite the recent summaries of dates obtained at Gravettian sites in southwestern France (Banks et al.,
2019; Douka et al., 2020), the chronology of assemblages with Noailles burins still needs to be refined in some regions,
such as southeastern France. At Mas Aguilhon, the presumed association of Noailles burins, shouldered points, including
one with an adjacent back, and truncated backed bladelets recalls the assemblages of sites such as Brassempouy
(Simonet, 2012) and Level G of the Grotte des Enfants (Balzi Rossi, Ligurie, Italy) (Onoratini, 1978; Simonet, 2010).
This association orients the chrono-cultural attribution of the Mas Aguilhon lithic assemblage toward the Middle or
Middle-Late Gravettian, extending to 23,000 BP if we consider the shouldered point phenomenon at a larger scale,
integrating the central and eastern European assemblages (Simonet, 2014).
La série lithique, issue de prospections mais aussi de sondages, est restée quasiment inédite (Combier, 1967 ; Gilles, 1994). L'ensemble comprend 80 outils retouchés et 560 produits de débitage. Parmi les outils, les armatures correspondent à des pointes à cran, des micropointes de la Gravette, des lamelles à dos parfois tronquées ou bitronquées ainsi qu'à des lamelles retouchées. Le reste de l'outillage est en majorité composé de grattoirs peu allongés, de burins diversifiés parmi lesquels plusieurs burins de Noailles, de lames tronquées, d'une lame appointée et de pièces esquillées.
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