Grotto des Fées (Châtelperron)
The Grotte des Fees ( German " Höhle der Feen" - also called Boîte, Bauma de las Fadas or Caves aux Fées) is located about one kilometer north of the village of Châtelperron , on the left bank of the Graveron stream in the Allier department in France . The place is named for the Châtelperronien , a culture at the transition from the Middle to the Upper Palaeolithic , which by means of radiocarbon dating to about 36,000 to 30,000 BC. Is dated. There are a number of places named z. B. Grotte des Fées (Tréal) in the French-speaking area.
The cave consists of two separate chambers, the Poirier cave and the Bailleau cave. Originally there was a third cave, the Effondrée cave, the superstructure of which has disappeared. The Bailleau cave is about 26.0 m deep and the Poirier cave 20.0 m deep. Both cavities were topographed in 1991 by Nicole Boullier, Jean-Yves Bigot and Claude Chabert.
Use of the caves
The first use takes place in the Moustérien , the second in the Châtelperronien. The early historical epoch is documented by the discovery of Gallo-Roman objects. In the 19th century a road worker moved into the caves.
In the middle of the 19th century, the construction of the railway in the Graverontal, which connected Bert with Dompierre-sur-Besbre , was the starting point for the discovery of the caves. As the railway line is curved at the level of the rock nose, the improvement in the radius of curvature led to the discovery of prehistoric objects in front of the entrance to the caves.
Albert Poirier, in charge of building the railroad, was a paleontologist and excavated the cave that bears his name.
Between 1867 and 1872, Guillaume Bailleau excavated the cave of the same name. He found several thousand polished flints and mammoth tusks over two meters long . The Effondrée cave was discovered in 1867 by Bailleau, who realized that it was a cave with a collapsed roof. In the 1950s, Henri Delporte, a specialist in the Aurignacien , examined the cave, where he emphasized two occupations in the Moustérien and Châtelperronien. The last excavations were carried out from 1951 to 1954 and 1962 by Delporte who found flint knives, chisels, scrapers and drills.
Most of the tools are in the British Museum and the Philadelphia Museum. Some pieces are exhibited in the Musée Anne de Beaujeu in Moulins and in the National Archaeological Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye .
The results of the excavations have fueled the controversy over the coexistence between anatomically modern humans and the Neanderthals .
The cave was classified as a monument historique in 1949 .
literature
- Jean-Yves Bigot, Claude Chabert: Les grandes cavités françaises dix ans après. Evolution des connaissances spéléologiques dans les départements français pauvres en cavités (1981–1991) , Spelunca, no 47, 1992 pp. 25–37.
- Jean-Yves Bigot: La grotte des Fées de Châtelperron (Allier) , Grottes & Gouffres, bull. SC Paris, no 123, 1992 pp. 16-18
Web links
Coordinates: 46 ° 24 ′ 41.8 " N , 3 ° 38 ′ 18.7" E