Find place Basses Coutures
In Basses Coutures near Beaumont-sur-Oise in the Val-d'Oise department in France , an Iron Age settlement and two menhirs were discovered and excavated over a Neolithic pit during the exploration of a building area in 2011 .
The settlement
The excavation revealed a number of storage pits dug into the alluvial land of the Oise . The pottery from the pits was made in the 5th century BC. (Early La Tène ) dated. The pits are up to 1.8 m deep and had a storage capacity of several cubic meters. Later, at the end of the 2nd century and during the 1st century BC A Gallic farm of local tradition stood here . The courtyard consisted of two enclosures made of rectangular and trapezoidal trenches and contained buildings on stilts and storage pits.
The main enclosure has an area of around 4000 m 2 . Their V-shaped trench was about three feet wide and five feet deep. The main building, standing on 17 posts, was about 70 m 2 in size and rectangular.
The second enclosure has an area of around 2300 m 2 and a narrower and shallower ditch. Some human skull fragments were found in the trench. Placing skulls in trenches is common during the late Latene culture. The enclosures are connected by a passage. This system was secured by a palisade and a small vertical moat. Outside the enclosures were a granary, fences, a pen and small storage pits.
The Neolithic in the Paris Basin
Around 5100 BC The first Neolithic groups settled in the Paris basin . During the construction of the A16 motorway, its traces were also found in Basses Coutures. Among them were the graves of a man, a woman and a child, which were dated to the early Neolithic (5,100-4,700 BC).
Around 4500 BC The megalith phenomenon arose in Brittany . The Val-d'Oise reached this phenomenon only at the end of the Neolithic (3500–2000 BC). Gallery tombs were the most numerous megalithic structures, of which only 15 survived. Some researchers believe it was originally more than 300. The monuments, such as Guiry-en-Vexin , sometimes contain the remains of several hundred people.
There are fewer megaliths in the Paris Basin than in other regions of France. 21 monuments exist in the Val-d'Oise and 18 others have been destroyed since the beginning of the 19th century in order to produce paving stones. Menhirs, which are otherwise often found near water, are less common.
The fallen menhirs of Champagne-sur-Oise
Two orthostats were found lying in an oval pit . These menhirs are the first in the Île-de-France region to be discovered in an archaeological context.
- The first menhir is made of ocher-colored stamped sandstone . It is 2 m long and 70 cm wide.
- The second block with similar dimensions is made of light gray limestone . It has been sharpened.
- Small blocks of limestone could be fragments of a third orthostat. A menhir's shoulder was found in the middle. This menhir has clearly been overturned.
These two or three menhirs are not the first in the Champagne-sur-Oise region. An anonymous text from 1905 entitled "Excursion Presles et l'Isle-Adam, du 17 mai 1903", published in the Bulletin de la Société d'Excursions scientifiques , reports on a row of stones. M. Denise carried out an excavation, but found only a few Neolithic pottery shards and flint.
Whether the menhirs of Champagne-sur-Oise were overturned during the Neolithic cannot be proven on the basis of the prehistoric-looking pottery shards found. But the phenomenon of the fallen menhirs is known from Brittany . In the 5th millennium BC Megaliths erected in BC were overturned in the Neolithic period. The large plate menhirs of Locmariaquer were cut up and reused in the construction of dolmens like Gavrinis .
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Coordinates: 49 ° 8 ′ 21.2 " N , 2 ° 14 ′ 43.4" E