March 24 2022 – 16h15 : international seminar PALEVOPRIM n° 31
Speakers
Marie-Anne JULIEN
GéoArchPal-GéoArchEon / Histoire naturelle de l’Homme préhistorique, UMR 7194, MNHN, CNRS, UPVD
Eric ROBERT
Histoire naturelle de l’Homme préhistorique – UMR 7194, MNHN, CNRS, UPVD
Topic
Environment, food, imagination: crossed views between fauna and graphic productions in the Paleolithic
Hunted, consumed, used, represented, animals held a central place for human societies of the Upper European Paleolithic. From 40,000 years ago, a diversity of representations, mostly animal, is manifested through the graphic representations of hundreds of caves and ornate shelters, and thousands of objects, statuettes, weapons or tools. However, it is not necessarily the same species that are depicted and represented in the sediments of sites of human occupation. This supports the oft-stated observation that a distinction exists between hunted animals and figurative animals.
In order to understand the entire relationships between humans and other living beings in their ecological and archaeological contexts, an unprecedented multidisciplinary examination of these issues has been initiated. Considering recent advances in the fields of prehistoric art, archaeozoology, dating or isotopic geochemistry, a collective of researchers from several institutions has launched a cross-cutting approach, within the “Envid’Images” program supported by the ENGIE Foundation. We tested our approach over a period and an area offering a high density of data through many sites: the Vézère valley, between 21,000 and 13,000 cal. BP. We will present both the axes explored in the
context of this research, the first results obtained within the corpus of habitat and/or ornate sites concerned by our investigations, and the perspectives opened up by this work.
Marie-Anne JULIEN is a bioarchaeologist at GéoArchPal-GéoArchEon, associated with the Department “Homme et Environnement” of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle (UMR 7194 HNHP). As specialist in the relationship between animal and human populations of the Middle and Upper Pleistocene, her work is based on transversal and multidisciplinary approaches to question both the behaviour of nomadic hunter collectors and the eco-ethology of their prey.
Place
Room 410, build. B35 (3rd floor, northern wing), University of Poitiers.