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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2024

Contours Découpés, Images Fragmentation, and Peoples’ Mobility in the Middle Magdalenian (19000-16000 cal. BP)

Des contours découpés… et partagés ?

Résumé

The contours découpés are graphic productions characteristic of the Middle Magdalenian (19000-16000 cal. BP). Often perforated, they are assumed to be artifacts of body ornament. They are mostly made from stylohyoid horse bones. The stylohyoid is the longest piece of the hyoid apparatus, a set of bony pieces located at the base of the skull between the branches of the mandibles. The dorsal end of this bone has a characteristic expansion called the styloid angle, which naturally evokes the shape of a mandible. The contours découpés are generally designed around this styloid angle. They are engraved almost systematically on both sides. Their iconography is almost exclusively dedicated to segmental animal depictions, with the prevalence of horses’ heads. The contours découpés are mainly found in the French Pyrenees. They are recognized as an emblematic element of the regional socio-cultural identity in the Middle Magdalenian. Previous studies yielded evidence of the high stylistic variability of these artefacts (morphometry, degree of shaping of the silhouette, number and formal rendering of the internal details). They also attested to their intra-site diversity, thus feeding a model of aggregation-dispersion type of socio-economic organization in which certain sites would have been aggregation sites (Mas-d’Azil, Isturitz). We decided to reconsider the regional distribution of the contours découpés depicting horses’ heads in a collaborative approach cros-sing the analysis of bone supports and the formal study of iconography. This new examination was made on the collection of contours découpés stored at the musée d’Archéologie nationale (64 pieces). As the contours découpés are highly fragmented, our goal was to test the hypothesis of mobility of fragments carried between different sites instead of mobility of whole pieces. We assessed the problems related to the quality of the archaeological data, since the pieces were mostly found in old excavations which neglected the fine frac-tion. We also tried to better understand the taphonomic limitations: the most fragile portions of the pieces are those that are most often missing, which suggests that the fragmentation would mainly result from differential conservation. Finally, we systematically tested refitting between fragments from different archaeological sites, but remained unsuccessful. The archaeological bias of the corpus, the taphonomic limitations and the absence of refitting challenge our hypothesis or at least our methodological capacity of investigation with the current data. In a second step to discuss the mobility of the contours découpés, the stylohyoid bones themselves appeared as a relevant methodo-logical perspective to consider. Each horse has two stylohyoid bones, a left one and a right one, and the two sides seem to have been indifferently used for the production of the artifacts. We questioned the possibility for the Middle Magdalenians to have separated pairs from the same horse, and then carried each single half in the sites. To test this second hypothesis, we set up a method to match the two contours découpés made from the two stylohyoid bones coming from the same horse. The observation of a reference collection of actual horses’ bones reveals that the morphology of stylohyoid bones varies noticeably between individuals, especially in the styloid angle. However, both stylohyoid (i.e. right and left) are very symmetrical on each individual. Within the archaeological collection, 1) each bone was lateralized when possible, mostly based on the curvature direction of the piece; 2) the thicknesses of the styloid angle tuberosity were systematically compared. Indeed, this area seems to be particularly variable between individuals, and is generally kept unmodified in the contours découpés; 3) the profiles of the styloid angles and the tympanohyoideums were finally compared by supe-rimposing their tracings made from zenithal photographs. The set of data yields evidence of the very high similarity of the bone supports of pieces 84670 and 84669 from Isturitz: they seem to be made on the left and right stylohyoids from the same horse. In a previous stylistic analysis, these two artifacts had been associated within the same stylistic group. Our new comparative formal study, this time taking into account both sides of the artifacts, reveals the unprecedented graphical proximity of these two contours découpés (similarity of 95,3%). Moreover, they both show the same logic of a different formal rendering between the external and the internal faces. Hence, this result reinforces the hypothesis of a matching of the two pieces, questioning a common single maker. This study is not sufficient to support the hypothesis of the sharing of objects between sites, since the two matched contours découpés come from the same place. However, it raises new issues: do these two artifacts depict the same horse portrait? Were they made and left on site, or were they brought in Isturitz from another site? In the hypothesis of an individual production, were the bones distributed and used (transformed into contours découpés) separately or by pair? This work underlines, on the one hand, the necessity to analyze the characteristics of the supports, and on the other hand, the need to consider the two sides of each object in the stylistic studies. It allowed us to test and validate a new methodological approach that should be refined and applied to all Magdalenian contours découpés.
Les contours découpés sont des productions graphiques caractéristiques du Magdalénien moyen (19000-16000 cal. BP) dans les Pyrénées françaises. Le plus souvent façonnés dans des os stylohyoïdes de chevaux dont ils figurent très majoritairement la tête, ils ont été régulièrement convoqués dans les travaux sur l’organisation sociale des populations de ce groupe culturel régional, notamment pour alimenter un modèle de type agrégation-dispersion. Nous avons souhaité reconsidérer la distribution régionale des contours découpés en forme de têtes de cheval dans une démarche collaborative, croisant analyse des supports osseux et étude formelle de l’iconographie, à partir de la collection conservée au musée d’Archéologie nationale. Ces artefacts étant caractérisés par une forte fragmentation, notre objectif était de tester l’hypothèse d’une mobilité, non de pièces entières, mais de fragments transportés entre différents gisements. Le biais archéologique du corpus, les limites taphonomiques et l’absence de remontage nous conduisent à relativiser cette hypothèse ou tout du moins notre capacité méthodolo-gique à l’objectiver dans l’état actuel des données. Chaque cheval possédant deux stylohyoïdes, nous nous sommes alors interrogés sur la possibilité du partage de paires d’éléments squelettiques qui auraient pu être individuellement transportés entre les sites. Nous avons ainsi établi une méthode pour apparier les contours découpés à partir des supports osseux en considérant l’épaisseur de la tubérosité de l’angle styloïdien ainsi que les profils des angles styloïdiens et des tympanohyoïdeums. Il en ressort que les pièces nos 84670 et 84669 d’Isturitz semblent être réalisées sur les stylohyoïdes gauche et droit d’un même cheval. Leur proximité graphique inédite (95,3 % de similarité) avec une même logique de traitement différencié des faces externes et des faces internes renforce l’hypothèse d’un appariement des deux pièces, soulevant la question d’un auteur commun. Bien que ce travail ne suffise pas à étayer l’hypothèse du partage des objets entre sites, puisque les deux contours découpés appariés proviennent du même gisement, il apporte un nouvel outil méthodologique pour discuter la problématique archéologique des relations inter-sites, qui devra cependant être affiné et appliqué à l’ensemble des contours découpés magdaléniens.
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hal-04649806 , version 1 (16-07-2024)

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Clément Birouste, Camille Bourdier. Des contours découpés… et partagés ? : Fragmentation des images et mobilité des personnes au Magdalénien moyen (19000-16000 cal. BP). Hiatus, lacunes et absences : identifier et interpréter les vides archéologiques, Actes du 29e Congrès préhistorique de France, 31 mai-4 juin 2021, Toulouse, Session Manifestations artistiques et symboliques, Société préhistorique française, pp.61-78, 2024. ⟨hal-04649806⟩
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