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8417.More information
Abstract This Late-Final Tardenoisian eponymous site lies 1 km north from Fère-en- Tardenois (Aisne), on a narrow belt ofTertiaiy Barton ian sand. Although it was published by Edmond Vielle in 1889, it was mainly excavated by René Parent, at first alone, then later with the authors' collaboration. The excavation was interrupted abruptly by the Administration, and the site destroyed by the construction of a pleasure ground. The sandy glade opening slightly above Allée Tortue and the Ru de la Pelle marsh was occupied by many Mesolithic bowmen's camps, without any material deposits which could have allowed them to be isolated : at least one from the early stage (a hearth without any material), at least eight at the end of the middle stage and, after a gap of one thousand years resulting from the d lying up of the marsh, some twenty camps from the final stage as soon as the water returned (fig. I) to what were probably numerous stretches. These identified camps lasted for a full millennium, to the veiy end of the Mesolithic. Their generally oval shapes confirm similar ones known elsewhere for the middle stage and suggest a far more advanced organisation of dwellings than previously imagined. It is veiy likely that lots of intervening less important camps occurred. Waste and common tools, which are indistinguishable, cannot be studied (except to note veiy abundant Montbani blades and bladelets and a tendency for the proportion of " armatures "to decrease, as everywhere in the final stage). We can only analyse the microliths (more than I 600), whose shapes and features the bowmen changed unceasingly, never returning to the past : Vielle trapezes and derived products — Belloy arrows, etc. — and also single points, at the end. This kind of study imperatively requires the accurate identification of all the items thanks to careful sorting out in good conditions. More than three quarters of the microliths are broken, 37 % of them showing certain marks of longitudinal impacts : we only find pieces resulting from the renewal of arrows after hunting or training. Combining spatial and typometric analyses allows, to a certain extent, the space occupied by the different camps to be taken into account, and in particular to demonstrate that these camps are the remains left by different persons with distinctive working-habits, due to the lapse of time. That removes any idea of the persistence of leaf-shaped points into the Final Mesolithic and assures us that use of the types of microliths did not last as long as we believed, not even one millennium. That also allows evolutive technical trends to be described, which mainly involve, beyond fashions in shapes, a progressive increase in all the measurements of the microliths, and therefore of their weights, certainly linked to the use of stronger arrows, very likely shot from more powerful bows. This slow improvement derived from that of the human brain.
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8418.More information
The procession of territorial scope that takes place every three years in the Saikang 西港 region (Tainan 臺南 ) symbolically accommodates and invigorates the space and the land, while at the same time setting the limits of a politico-religious territory composed of contiguous village units. The latter identify themselves as localized cult communities, drawing on their temples dedicated to various protective deities from the pantheon of Chinese popular religion, as it has developed in Taiwan. The performance of the processional ritual seals and reproduces an inter-community alliance based on the koah-hiun 刈香 institution, from which the procession takes its name. This text shows the importance of this ritual to legitimize residential anchorage, control the danger represented in the anthropomorphized form of wandering souls (those of humans who died an unfortunate death), guarantee the regulation of water and regenerate the nourishing power of the earth, in an agricultural context and within a broader natural order. With a two-fold aim, apotropaic and propitiatory, facing the aleatory and working simultaneously on luck and misfortune, the ritual aims at renewing Life and ensuring health, peace and prosperity for all. The exercise of a shamanic function, as put forward by Roberte Hamayon, is the avenue that has proved to be the most fruitful in meeting the double objective of general understanding and characterization of the socio-religious system deployed in this regular ritual of totalizing scope.
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8419.
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