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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2019

Did Solutrean flint knappers control the heating environments to heat-treat raw materials ?

Résumé

The Solutrean (25.5-23 ky cal BP) is a period of transformations of the stone tool equipment. Hunting implements become more specific and two new techniques appear: pressure retouch and heat treatment. These innovations appear in the Upper Solutrean and have been interpreted as proxies of high technical skill and social learning. Unfortunately, many aspects of Solutrean heat treatment are still poorly understood. Here, we investigate the Solutrean heating technique. We examine a series coming from the perhaps most important Solutrean sites in southwestern France, where heat treatment was first described in the 1960s: Laugerie-Haute. We use non-destructive infrared spectroscopy to estimate heating temperatures of 15 Solutrean tools (mostly laurel-leaf points) to obtain data on the used heating environments and conditions. We found a well-calibrated heating temperature close to 300°C, suggesting that a dedicated heating environment was used to recreate similar conditions during successive heating cycles. Such standardised conditions cannot be maintained if heat-treatment was an opportunistic technique relying on open-air fires. Rather, a specialised structure, perhaps underground, must have been used. This finding has implications for our understanding of the investments in terms of time and resources, Solutrean knappers were capable and willing to invest in producing their highly specialised tool-kit.
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Dates et versions

hal-04254473 , version 1 (23-10-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04254473 , version 1

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Julie Bachellerie, Patrick Schmidt. Did Solutrean flint knappers control the heating environments to heat-treat raw materials ?. 12th International Symposium on Knappable Materials (ISKM 2019), Nov 2019, Budapest, France. ⟨hal-04254473⟩
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