Traces of a perennial habitat were unearthed this summer in the vast Neolithic site of the Marais de Saint-Gond in the Marne, which now offers an exceptionally complete picture of its social organization, 150 years after the discovery of the first flints.
“It’s the last piece of the puzzle that we were missing,” explains Rémi Martineau, researcher at the CNRS, who located the village with his team. In the Marais de Saint-Gond region, 15 large flint quarries have already been identified over 450 hectares, as well as 135 hypogea – underground collective funerary constructions. Five megalithic covered walkways, ten ax polishers and fields cultivated by burning have also been located since the discovery of the first flints a century and a half ago.
This new discovery makes it possible to take a step forward in the understanding of “the economic, societal and territorial organization of the Neolithic”, continues the archaeologist according to whom there is “no equivalent” of such a set in Europe.
The discovery of this Late Neolithic village (-3500/-3000), took place in the middle of summer, when a ditch for the installation of a palisade was precisely identified in Val-des-Marais, in the south of the Marne. The prehistoric enclosure went around a hillock, enclosing a space estimated, for the time being, at one hectare, according to the archaeological assessment recently completed in an area that is now mainly agricultural, AFP noted.
In the aftermath, a first apse building with two naves, attached to the interior of the enclosure, against a large rubbish pit 20 m in diameter, was cleared, as well as wells outside. Settled, this population of farmers and breeders settled near the water, above the water table. “The site was fully structured, explains Rémi Martineau. The foundations of our society are already there.” These successive discoveries are the result of a research program launched twenty years ago, piloted by the CNRS.
The latest campaign – which notably brings together the CNRS, the joint laboratory Artehis, the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté and the Ministry of Culture – mobilized a total of around fifty people, including researchers from multiple disciplines in France and abroad. foreigner, as well as twenty “diggers”, mostly archeology students. In particular, they unearthed an oval element in freshwater mussel mother-of-pearl, a veritable “museum piece” according to Rémi Martineau.
Tiny, it is pierced with two holes in the center. This probable ancestor of the button, -3400/-3300 years old-, is in “exceptional state of preservation”, giving hope to the researcher that the rest of the site will be “perfectly preserved” if more complete excavations are carried out later.
