Documents found
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102.More information
ABSTRACT Examination of the funerary rites of the western prehistory, from the recent Upper Paleolithic to the Neolithic, allows to propose a new history of collective burials. Their roots lie into the Magdalenian, the first stirrings are perceptible during the early Mesolithic of the north-west, while the mature period developed along the Atlantic. The argument is based, on the one hand, on the recent discovery of collective burials belonging to the early Mesolithic in the Meuse (Belgium) and on the recurrence of the manipulation of bodies within the Magdalenian environments and, on the other hand, on similarities concerning treatment of the dead by western hunters, the builders of megaliths and the users of the collective burials. Finally, we have to remember that the hypotheses tending to recognise an evolution of the funerary rites within the Neolithic, hingeon a progressive passage from the individual tomb to the collective one, without taking ideologies into account.
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105.More information
Amongst the large menhirs erected as open-air sanctuaries in the 5th millennium BC on the present-day peninsula of Locmariaquer in the Gulf of Morbihan, the stèle aux bovidés stands out by the uniqueness of its horned animal figures in the engraved art of the Armorican Neolithic - whence its name - and by its «megalithic puzzle» aspect. The ornamentation of this monolith, originally more rock art than parietal art, cut into sections and reused in various dolmen capstones, presents a couple of animal outlines that are exceptional on more than one level. While the transformation of the famous quadruped of the Table-des-Marchand into a horned animal, after adding the truncated horns of the Gavrinis passage grave, is at the origin of the theoretical connection of the two fragments of the still incomplete standing stone, it is rather the unusual horns of the other bovid, figured whole on the same slab, that caught our attention. Microwear analysis of these impressive horns indeed questions the usually accepted sexual or zoomorphic characteristics by revealing the astute association of a pair of crosses back to back in the continuation of the raised horns. This linking of signs, both common in Neolithic symbolism and unusual in this fully figurative and joined form, underlines, after deciphering, our overall simplistic vision of megalithic engravings and the obsolescence of most tracings that would benefit from updating from a technical, rather than artistic, point of view (translated by Estelle Bougard).
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108.More information
The three functions in the Soddo area (Ethiopia) The still undated monoliths of this area show a tripartite organization of their decorative engravings (downwards : swords, stylized plant, subterranean perforation related to the dead's skull) which may square with the conceptions of the indo-european peoples of the Mediterranean (unitary heaven, surface of the earth, subterranean world).
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