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473.
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474.
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476.More information
In the French Mediterranean arch, over more than the past century, specialists in recent Prehistory have been focusing on developing a chrono-cultural framework. In this context, pottery forms and decorative styles have been of primary importance for identifying cultural entities of limited geographic extension, and which developed original traits. This article presents a critical review of all the French region-wide literature and a historiographic analysis of the end of the Neolithic. The objective is to dissect the current theories on this period and their use in the development of an explanatory system whose demonstrations, despite all these years of research, are still too often based on an accumulation of non-updated empirical hypotheses. Three broad aspects of the history of the chrono-cultural framework development in south-eastern France are thus critically reviewed in order to distinguish valid foundations and remaining uncertainties on the origin, evolution, transformation and imbrications of Eastern Rhone groups. We show, for example, the primacy of the Languedoc element in the formation of Provençal groups and therefore the more or less strong links in the supposed relationships between cultures on both sides of the Rhône. By exploring the geographic dimension attributed to these groups and the adequacy of the scale at which they are defined, the difficulties in ordering these cultures to reflect their renewals and different spatial (facies) and chronological (possibility of internal phasing) variations also become evident. Finally, the reintegration of data concerning the end of the Neolithic in a zone extending from central Italy to the eastern Languedoc and from the Mediterranean coast to the western Swiss lakes, presents an opportunity to coordinate information from various geo-cultural spheres in order to replace the Final Neolithic of Provence within a much broader context. This paper thus ends with the first research orientations that we propose to follow in order to resolve the problems exposed throughout this integrated analysis.
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478.
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479.
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