Mousterian (Neanderthal) Sites Mousterian (Neanderthal) Sites
Les fouilles O. Hauser au Moustier.
Le baton indique le lieu de découverte du squelette du Moustier 1.
(Cliché O. Hauser)
Excavations by O. Hauser at Le Moustier.
The stick indicates the place where the skeleton of Le Moustier 1 was discovered.
Photo: O. Hauser, display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Vue de site du Moustier au début du XXe siècle.
(Cliché MNP, fond D.Peyrony)
View of the Le Moustier site at the start of 20th Century.
Photo: MNP, display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Vue de site du Moustier au début des fouilles.
(Cliché MNP, fond D.Peyrony)
View of the Le Moustier site at the start of the excavations by D. Peyrony.
Photo: MNP, display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
(left) Cross section of the two gisements of le Moustier.
(right) Cross section of the lower terrace of le Moustier.
Photo: Peyrony (1930), in Groenen (1994)
Le Moustier in the Dordogne. Neanderthal man lived in these rock shelters overlooking the small town of Le Moustier, and gave its name to a characteristic Neanderthal tool set and culture, the Mousterian.
Le Moustier is on the right bank of the Vezere at its confluence with the Vimont valley. Village houses rise in tiers on the rocky steps of the limestone outcrops at the angle formed by the two valleys.
Photo: Delluc et al (1992)
My thanks to Sharon Rogers/walkhound for alerting me to this excellent book.
The following is from H.Laville et al, 'Rock Shelters of the Perigord':
Le Moustier is the name of a village 10 km upstream from Les Eyzies, under the spur of a cliff formed by the intersection of the Vezere and Plazac valleys. The upper shelter has been studied since 1863, and is now completely excavated, so that no further study is possible.
The lower shelter is 14 metres below the upper, and occupies the base of the cliff in the village itself, the bedrock being lower than the modern riverbank. It was first excavated in 1907. Most recently, Laville and Rigaud conducted well organised excavations there in 1969. The bulk of the deposit has been removed, but a control section for later work remains.
Photo of the upper shelter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Moustier
The Lower Shelter at Le Moustier has been well set up to accommodate tour groups. We were very fortunate to have an erudite researcher from the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies as our guide.
At the same time, it gave me a lot of practice in trying to follow fast, fluent and specialised French!
There has been a revolution in the veracity of casts, at least in France. The quality is superb, to the point where you are often not at all sure whether what you are looking at is an original or a facsimile.
The casts are done with a very fine material, which gives an excellent reproduction, and then the monocolour cast is hand coloured to match the original.
This is a cast of the soil profile at Le Moustier, and every "stone" is individually coloured. Casts of this quality mean that researchers around the world can be sure that what they are studying is hardly affected by the fact that they are looking at and measuring a reproduction, not the original, and it means that museums around the world can have a superb exhibition which is indistinguishable from that in the host museum.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
This shaft is lined with a cast of the profile below the viewer's feet. Note that level B, almost at the bottom of the shaft, is labelled "Mousterien typique".
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Although the (first discovered) upper shelter has been completely excavated, and no further work may be completed there, this lower shelter has been more carefully excavated with an eye to future developments in the practice of Archaeology.
A section of the site has been purposely not touched, to allow future researchers to do further study. These photos show worked flints eroding from one of these profiles, just above the shaft pictured above.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
This area behind and to one side of the display area has been left to allow researchers to make further investigations.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
These photographs show the general area of the site, and allow the viewer to see the general layout of the shelter, allowing for the fact that originally the shelter would have had a lot more room under the overhang, now filled by sediments.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Découverte au printemps 1908, la Sépulture néandertalienne du Moustier 1, reconnue comme telle peu de temps après celle de la Chapelle-aux-Saints (Corrèze). apporte un nouvel argument à la communauté scientifique.
Les fouilles de l'époque, conduites par Hauser, ne sont malheureusement pas à la hauteur de l'enjeu.
Ce fossile fondamental connaît encore différents avatars pendant la deuxième guerre mondiale avant de pouvoir, enfin, être restauré et bien étudieé partir des années 1990.
Discovered in spring 1908, Moustier 1 was recognized as a neanderthal burial shortly after the discovery of the old man of la Chapelle-aux-Saints, a few hundred kilometres away. Excavations at the time, led by Hauser, were poorly done.
This fundamental fossil was not properly studied until it was restored in the 1990s.
Text: Adapted and translated from the display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Skull of Le Moustier 1, created by the Stereolithography process. Normally the result would then be hand coloured to accurately reflect those of the original object, but the facsimile has been left in its raw state in this case, presumably to more dramatically show the process.
The object to be duplicated in resin is first scanned by a laser, building up a data file of hundreds or thousands of "slices" of the original object (the skull of Moustier 1 in this case), which is not harmed in the process.
Stereolithography is an additive fabrication process utilizing a vat of liquid UV-curable photopolymer "resin" and a UV laser to build parts a layer at a time. On each layer, the laser beam traces a part cross-section pattern on the surface of the liquid resin. Exposure to the UV laser light cures or solidifies the pattern traced on the resin and adheres it to the layer below.
After a pattern has been traced, the SLA's elevator platform descends by a single layer thickness, typically 0.05 mm to 0.15 mm (0.002" to 0.006"). Then, a resin-filled blade sweeps across the part cross section, re-coating it with fresh material. On this new liquid surface the subsequent layer pattern is traced, adhering to the previous layer. A complete 3-D part is formed by this process. After building, parts are cleaned of excess resin by immersion in a chemical bath and then cured in a UV oven.
Text: Adapted from Wikipedia.
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source:
Reconstitution par stéréolithographie du crâne du Moustier 1, fouilles O. Hauser, auteur C. P. E. Zollikofer. (Collection de l'institut d'Anthropologie de l'Université de Zurich, Suisse)
Facsimile, Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Exhumé par Peyrony dès 1914, mais scientifiquement fouillé en 1996, le squelette de nouveau-né du Moustier 2 est, pour sette classe d'âge, l'un des deux fossiles les mieux conservés au monde.
La fosse, ovulaire, longue de 50 cm et profonde de 40 cm, a été creusée à partir de la couche J jusqu'à la couche H (vers 40 000). Le bébé reposait coucheé sur le dos, la tête calée à gauche par un bloc calcaire.
Text: From the display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Caption with the photo at left:
The neonatal skeleton Le Moustier 2 is one of the most complete Neanderthal individuals ever discovered. The parietals and the posterior part of the hemifrontals are broken into small fragments. The left temporal, both scapulae and the pubis are missing. Most of the cranial base and face, deciduous tooth germs, cervical vertebrae and long bones are preserved.
The right humerus and femur, formerly misidentified as La Ferrassie 4, are not shown. Many Neanderthal derived traits can be seen in the lateral and basal portions of the occipital bones and the petrous portion of the temporal bone. Derived traits are also evident in the postcranial skeleton in the medio–lateral curvature of the radius, the relative proportion of the thumb phalanxes, the orientation of the ulna head and the curvature of the ribs. The thickness and mass of the bones are noteworthy.
Photo: P. Jugie / Musée National de Préhistoire
Source:Maureille (2002a)
Industrie lithique associée au squellette du Moustier 2, fouille D. Peyrony. (Collection du Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies)
Tools associated with the Moustier 2 skeleton, found by D. Peyrony. (Collection of the Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies)
Text: Adapted and translated from the display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
Photo: Don Hitchcock 2008
Source: Display at Musée National de Préhistoire, Les Eyzies
On 19 May 1914, during excavations along the western edge of the earlier Hauser explorations, D. Peyrony (1921, 1930) discovered the remains of another human skeleton. This discovery is listed as Le Moustier 2 in the catalogue of European human fossils (Vandermeersch 1971). According to Peyrony (1930 ; see also Laville et al. 1980) the Le Moustier 2 burial pit originated in archaeological level J (a 40 cm brown layer containing a Typical Mousterian industry ; tab. 1) and was intrusive into levels I (a 20 cm sterile fluviatile level with Denticulate Mousterian tools heavily damaged by cryoturbation) and H (a 120-130 cm very rich brown layer, containing a Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition industry, type B). Archaeological levels J and H have been recently dated back (TL method), respectively, to 40,300 ± 2,600 and 42,500 ± 2,000BP (Valladas et al. 1986 ; tab. 2). The burial pit has the shape of a truncated cone of 40 cm depth with an upper oval diameter of 50 cm. The mixing of the sediments from layers J, I and H inside the pit as well as its limits were evident (Peyrony 1921, 1930). D. Peyrony recorded no data about the position of the skeleton in the pit nor any description of the state of conservation of the bones. It appears likely that immediately after the discovery, D. Peyrony «showed» some pieces of the skeleton to M. Boule, who was at the time examining fossils from earlier excavations of J.-L. Capitan and D. Peyrony at the La Ferrassie site. It is unclear, however, if M. Boule was given any information about the archaeological context of the infant skeleton and the Le Moustier site. Peyrony’s diary mentions that five days after the discovery of Le Moustier 2, M. Boule informed him that this was the skeleton of a neonate.Text above: Maureille (2002b)
Although D. Peyrony mentioned the Le Moustier 2 discovery in his publications about the site and discussions about Mousterian funeral practises, the specimen was not mentioned by M. Boule in his often highly critical appraisal of D. Peyrony’s interpretations of the site’s geological formation (Boule 1931). More important, it was also unlisted in the published listing of the human fossil finds from the Périgord «sent» to the Paleontological Department of the Musée National d’Histoire Naturel (MNHN) in Paris (Boule 1923) and was not mentioned in M. Boule synthetic books on human evolution (Boule 1921). In his 1936 catalogue of Paleolithic skulls, E. Hue noted that the Le Moustier 2 specimen was located at the Musée de Préhistoire des Eyzies (Hue 1937). But after the death of D. Peyrony (the 26th of November 1954), the existence of this fossil, or even its location, was no longer acknowledged. Some scholars suggested that it had been lost in Paris (Heim 1976, p. 6, note 1 and fig. 2a). Others believed that its whereabouts were unknown (Vandermeersch 1971).
In September 1996, in collaboration with members of the Musée National de Préhistoire (MNP) team, a comprehensive survey of the human remains in the archaeological collections of the Museum was undertaken. During this work, the remains of a human neonatal skeleton were found with the Le Moustier lithic collections. They were in a drawer containing Mousterian artifacts and some of the bones were isolated while others remained embedded in blocks of sediment. The bones were not marked nor was the container in which they were stored identified in any way. The possibility that this unidentified skeleton might be that of the missing Mousterian age infant mentioned by D. Peyrony led to an intensive examination of his unpublished notes and diaries concerning his work at the Le Moustier site (fig. 2a et 2b). These revealed no evidence that the remains of the Le Moustier 2 infant had at any time left the museum of Les Eyzies. Thus, the published suggestion that this skeleton had disappeared in Paris was mistaken.
George Collie (left) and Denis Peyrony in 1927 at Le Moustier.
Photo:
Straus (2001)