La cachette de lames en silex de la grotte de la Clapade à Millau.
Résumé
The Clapade cave in Millau (Aveyron) is known for having delivered a group of five flint
blades that were hidden in a crevice of the rock face. The petrographic and technological
analyses carried out on these blades make it possible to specify their origin, their dating and
their cultural attribution. These pieces are all made of oligocene lacustrine flint from the AptForcalquier basin, they are large blades (L. ˃ to 18 cm, l. ˃ 2 cm) imported which were
produced in Western Provence according to various debitage techniques such as indirect
percussion on bent cores (conical or semi-conical) and lever pressure on flat quadrangular
cores. These technical characteristics allow comparisons with other similar pieces from
various sites in the north-western Mediterranean area whose dates are accurate. This is how
we can place this blade deposit in the absolute between the beginning of the late Neolithic and
the full Copper Age in a chronological range between 3500 and 2800 BC. The originality of
the hoard of the Clapade cave is to include only pieces transformed by retouching, obviously
used, and for one of them broken. These are retouched blades with glossy edges and ends
arranged in points or rounded fronts that probably served as knives, sickles and scrapers. The
traces of adhesive preserved on half of one of these blades make it possible to interpret it as a
harvester's knife with axial side sleeve, which allows other comparisons with bone handle
tools of the Treilles group in its ancient and middle stages (3200-2800 BCE). The broken
blade may have been a "tongue dagger" whose type cannot be precisely defined but which had
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a proximal axial sleeve, which brings it closer to other examples of the ancient and classical
Treilles group. These dating proposals are consistent with other information on the insertion
of the Treilles group in the evolution of exchange relations of the Southern France Late
Neolithic, which went through three major stages. The oldest was dominated by the
contributions of Bedoulian flint blades from the Vaucluse, the second was dominated by the
contributions of blades and long-tongue daggers from the Apt-Forcalquier basin and the third
stage dominated by the contributions of daggers shaped by scarf retouching from both the
Apt-Forcalquier basin and the Grand-Pressigny. The traces of sleeve related to the presence of
adhesive on the handle and of shiny wear on the edges can tell us how to manage these blades
during their functional histories. They probably arrived in the form of long blades that were
arranged into proximo-axial sleeved blades similar to proto-daggers and when broken they
could be recycled as axial side sleeve knife blades.