🌍 🐚 Regional diversity of personal ornament in Europe associated to pre-Aurignacian Upper Palaeolithic techno-complex, with shell beads exclusively found in Mediterranean-Uluzzian contexts (14/20)

🧹 📈 Spatial stats tested associations among artefacts, fauna, shells & pigments.
▶️ Shells + pigments + Châtelperronian cluster together;
▶️ Bison links with Mousterian

‼️First evidence of shell beads with Châtelperronian artefacts ‼️

(13/20)

⛏️🧹 Unlike the area excavated by Levêque, this layer is ~45% Châtelperronian (2 points, 3 cores, 15 blades/fragments), while the Mousterian component is mixed and heterogeneous, combining Discoid and Levallois systems (11/20)

🐚 🔬Microscopic analyses by @solangerigaud.bsky.social revealed that perforated shells show no wear, and pigment staining comes from nearby hematite. With 14 intact shells, little/no wear, and high fragmentation, the evidence supports a shell ornament workshop (8/20)

🐚 The littorina, characterized by a wide range of natural colors when fresh, originate from the Atlantic coast, situated about 100 km away from La Roche-à-Pierrot at the time of the occupation (7/20)

🐚 🔴 In just 1 m², 184 shells and shell fragments (MNI = 58, mostly Littorina obtusata), alongside 183 pieces of hematite were recovered—both with clear human modifications. Thirty shells show pressure perforations, and the pigments bear percussion marks (6/20)

⛏️🧹 From 2018 to 2020, excavations of the layer once attributed to Levêque’s Châtelperronian revealed—in the best-preserved and thickest part of the sequence—the oldest known shell ornament workshop, dated to at least 42,000 years ago (5/20)

📖La Roche-à-Pierrot (Saint-Césaire, Charente-Maritime, France) is famous for its rich Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic sequence and the 1979 discovery of a partial Neandertal skeleton in a layer once attributed to the Châtelperronian (2/20)

Last field season at Hara Idé 3 #Djibouti. Great team and PSPCA program led by @jessiecauliez.bsky.social. Lets now focus on publishing our results on this unique Late Pleistocene archaeological site ! #LSA #HornofAfrica #Afar #Prehistory #Paleoanthropology @cnrs.bsky.social @pacea.bsky.social

Looking forward to these 3 days of conference #EAA2024, @archaeologyeaa.bsky.social in #Rome, and to our exciting session tomorrow within the framework of the IRP project ABASC @cnrs.bsky.social
@univbordeaux.bsky.social
and Prague National Museum

'til next year to beat the record of over 3000 artefacts plotted and to continue the mushroom hunting contest🤗...

Lost during life, this little incisor of a 6-8 year old child gives us a glimpse of the everyday life of a Neandertal group that lived, hunted and probably smoked meat along the Coran river during the #MiddlePaleolithic (2/4)

📢Exciting field season this year in Saint-Césaire in Charente-Maritime with the excavation of a ~55 000 year old #Neandertal midden full of bison, horse and reindeer butchered remains! But nothing compares to the in-situ find of a Neandertal child tooth 🦷🤩⬇️ (1/4)

Pour la sortie de ce magnifique livre grand public sur le #Rift africain - #anthropologie #geologie #prehistoire #geographie - Les deux jours de présentations par les chercheurs du GDR Rift sont accessibles ici ➡️ rift-cnrs.fr/actualites/2...

⚠️ ‼️It is out and open access ‼️ First papers of the proceedings of the ANR Big Dry project on Late Pleistocene to Holocene population & cultural dynamics in northeast Africa
⬇️
#prehistory #archaeology #Africa
www.prehistoire.org/515_p_57951/...