Les Alpes maritimes françaises à l'âge du Bronze : bilan chrono-culturel
Résumé
The French Maritime Alps in the Bronze Age: chrono-cultural assessment-The purpose of this contribution is to provide an updated summary of chrono-cultural data concerning the French side of the Maritime Alps during the Bronze Age (circa 2200-750 BC). This territory located on the borders of France and Italy, which is therefore crucial for understanding the relations established between cultural groups located on both sides of the Alpine chain, provides for this period a relatively abundant but often unknown documentation. The researches carried out over the last twenty years now make it possible to fill part of this void. An examination of the cultural components and geographical orientations of ceramic and metal furniture from a corpus of 135 sites makes it possible, for each chronological phase, to attempt to define the place of this space in the cultural geography of the circum-alpin Bronze Age and evaluate its role in the dynamics of each period. Consideration of the data concerning the settlement and the funerary practices, still delicate to handle, bring additional lessons. Although the start of the Early Bronze Age (BA 1-2) is still poorly documented in the Maritime Alps, it seems that the first cultural components of the Bronze Age were disseminated among the local Neolithic populations from influxes of the central plain of Po. However, the dynamic is reversed with the full Early Bronze Age (BA 3). Eastern Provence, but also Western Liguria, can then be attached to the complex of the «South-French Early Bronze Age». Still little known, the end of the Early Bronze Age (BA 4) seems for its part marked by an intensification of transalpine relations that may foreshadow a new inversion of dynamics in favor of northwestern Italy. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age to the middle of the Late Bronze Age (BM-BF 1-2a), the Maritime Alps are indeed placed in the orbit of the cultures that succeed each other in NorthWest Italy. An important break appears to occur with the full Bronze Final (BF 2b), period for which no clues informs the occupation of the territory. The documentation does not reappear until the end of the Bronze Age (BF 3) and reveals a contrasting situation with, in the ceramic style, influences coming from both Mediterranean France and Median France. Although links with groups in northwestern Italy are not as marked as before, there are many parallels with western coastal Liguria. The Maritime Alps are part of the process of regionalization of cultural groups marking the end of the Bronze Age on both sides of the Alps. The territory examined here possesses, in total, all the characters of a space functioning as a cultural relay between the populations located on both sides of the Alps and shows, if need be, that the latter did not constitute in the Bronze Age a barrier.