Île Téviec
| Île Téviec | ||
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| Waters | Biscay , Atlantic Ocean | |
| Geographical location | 47 ° 33 '22 " N , 3 ° 9' 55" W | |
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| length | 460 m | |
| width | 190 m | |
| surface | 8 ha | |
| Highest elevation | 11 m | |
| Residents | uninhabited | |
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The Île Téviec or Théviec , in Breton Tevieg , is a rocky island of just 8 hectares in size and up to 11 m high in front of the Côte Sauvage ("wild coast") about 2 km west of the isthmus of the Quiberon peninsula in the Morbihan department of Brittany in western France. The barren island north of the smaller Îlot de Guernic , which is now uninhabited, is an important place for the archeology of the French Late Mesolithic .
Archaeological site
Téviec is one of the few sites of archaeological finds from the Mesolithic in Brittany. In 1928 the couple Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart , who carried out a series of archaeological excavations, discovered the remains and graves of people from the Mesolithic on the island . According to somewhat uncertain radiocarbon dating of several samples (1999), these are a period between approx. 6740 ± 60 and approx. 5680 ± 50 BP - corresponding to approx. 4790 to 3730 BC. BC - and thus to be assigned to the late Mesolithic or its end.
In contrast to the still Pleistocene section of the younger Paleolithic ( Upper Palaeolithic ), the Mesolithic is set in Central Europe post-glacial , with the beginning of the Holocene around 12,000 years ago; it ends with the appearance of Neolithic sedentary cultures, different from region to region. From the people who previously lived in groups as hunters and gatherers , artefacts made of conch shells, stag horn, bones and their particularly fine stone tools have been preserved. Such microliths characterize the Mesolithic and allow further differentiation according to shape and design.
Between 1928 and 1930, the archaeologist couple Péquart visited the island several times to examine piles of rubbish ( Køkkenmøddinger ) and uncover grave sites. Ten grave sites were found with the remains of a total of twenty-three people, both adults and children. The grave (A) of two people under 35 years old was located under a large pile of shells. They were carefully interred in a shallow pit next to each other with upright torsos and bent legs in a crouched position, and vaulted with antlers and buried under remains of mussels , the high calcium content of which contributed to their good conservation.
In addition to artifacts made of flint stone and wild boar bones as grave goods, jewelry was preserved on the skeletons: pierced sea shells mounted in chains around the neck, arms and ankles, as well as bone objects with engraved lines. Both skeletons show fractures as a result of external violence, which may have occurred postmortem . On some skeletons from other graves there are indications of fatal or serious injuries, for example from arrow wounds. The microliths and devices found during the excavations, including a so-called perforated rod , are roughly based on the Tardenoisie .
The Téviec finds are of considerable importance for our understanding of the late Mesolithic at the transition to the Neolithic . They document the funeral rites of the last hunter-gatherer cultures in western Europe and show phenomena of increasing complexity towards the end of the late Mesolithic in north-western Europe. From a geographical perspective, they fill a gap between the Mesolithic finds in Portugal and southern Scandinavia - alongside those on the neighboring Île d'Hœdic and those on the Pointe de la Torche . The published isotope analyzes of bone samples also allow conclusions to be drawn about the special role of marine resources in feeding the Mesolithic on Téviec and Hoëdic. They also show a difference between the two islands. Those buried on Hoëdic covered around 75% of their protein needs from the sea, those on Téviec used maritime and terrestrial protein sources each to around 50%. An interpretation of these results has to take into account the different height of the sea level and is not very useful without knowledge of the accessibility or land connection of the islands today.
Téviec's tomb in the Toulouse Museum
One of the ten graves, grave A, opened in 1928, was later lifted from the site in the block and taken to the Natural History Museum of Toulouse , where the bone finds were prepared and the grave situation was reconstructed in 1938 and the ensemble was then stored. After a complete overhaul, the restored showpiece was first presented in 2010 in the Toulouse Museum as part of an exhibition on prehistory.
Reconstituted tomb of Téviec
Both skeletons with shell chains
Section left
skull
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literature
- Simone Ansquer: Téviec, le Secret . Quadri signe-A. Bargain, Quimper 2006, ISBN 2-914532-87-3 , ( Enquêtes & suspense ).
- Rick Schulting: Antlers, bone pins and flint blades: the Mesolithic cemeteries of Téviec and Hoëdic, Brittany. Antiquity 70 (268), 335-351, doi: 10.1017 / S0003598X00083319
- Marthe Péquart, Saint Just Péquart: Sur une vertèbre humaine mésolithique percée d'une flèche. In: Association Française pour l'Avancement des Sciences 55, 1931, pp. 321-324.
Web links
- http://www.espace-sciences.org/science/10065-sciences-ouest/20113-Annee-2000/10149-164/10450-gros-plan/13578-histoire-et-societe/13579-les-pionniers- de-l-archeology /
- http://www.survoldefrance.fr/affichage2.php?img=7709
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b R. Schulting: Nouvelles dates AMS à Téviec et Hoëdic (Quiberon, Morbihan). In: Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française . Volume 96, No. 2, 1999, pp. 203-207. The author points out possible inaccuracies and the difficulty of calibration.
- ↑ B. Boulestin: Rites funestes et mythes romanesques: la leçon de la sépulture A de Téviec. In: Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française. Volume 113, No. 4, 2016, pp. 811-813.
- ^ Website of the Muséum Toulouse for the exhibition Préhistoire [s ]; accessed January 8, 2018.