Le Moustier

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Le Moustier is a prehistoric site in the Vézère valley near Peyzac-le-Moustier in the Dordogne department in France . The Moustérien , one of the periods of the Paleolithic from 120,000 to 40,000 years ago, was named after this site.

Geographical location

Le Moustier - upper Abri, populated in the Moustérien

The stair-like rock spur of limestone from the Upper Eturon and the Lower Coniacium containing the two sites is located in the immediate vicinity of Le Moustier , only 100 meters north of the church. The two main discovery sites are located in this rock spur - an upper Abri populated in Moustérien and 15 meters below it, on the level of today's Vézère Valley (around 70 meters above sea level), a lower Abri. The rock spur lies between Vimont and Vézère from which it was formed. It is crowned by a cave. The walls above the demolition are partly overhanging.

The site does not belong to the commune of Peyzac-le-Moustier, but already belongs to the territory of the commune of Saint-Léon-sur-Vézère .

On a right-hand slope of the Vézère, around 500 meters southwest of Le Moustier and just below the confluence of the Vimont, a rock wall was also eroded out of the rock below the hamlet of sous le Ruth , in which two other prehistoric sites are located (Le Ruth and Abri Cellier).

Le Moustier is located about 10 kilometers northeast of Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil .

Finds

The first excavations were carried out by Édouard Armand Lartet and Henry Christy in 1860. They discovered rough stone tools that went into science as Moustérien (initially Moustiérien ). Gabriel de Mortillet later adopted this name for one of the Paleolithic periods . Researchers who led excavations in the early 20th century included Maurice Bourlon , Otto Hauser, and Denis Peyrony .

Le Moustier 1

From 1907 the Swiss prehistory researcher Otto Hauser was the first to work in the lower abri. The skeleton of a young Neanderthal man was discovered here in 1908 . On August 12, 1908, a nine-person group of experts led by the Breslau anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch began the recovery. The find was initially referred to as " Homo moustériensis Hauseri". Another important find by Hauser was the skeleton of the man from Combe Capelle, discovered in 1909 . Both skeletons were sold by Hauser for the exorbitant sum of 160,000 gold marks at the time to the Royal Museum of Ethnology , of which 110,000 gold marks went to the skeleton by Le Moustier. Hauser was able to achieve the high price for fossil finds, which was uniquely high up until then, because there was also a solvent prospect in the USA.

The Gropiusbau was bombed at the end of the Second World War, and large parts of the postcranial skeleton were burned. The surviving skeletal parts were not examined until the 1970s; there were still 13 fragments. During the last years of the war, the skull was kept separately as an irreplaceable treasure. After the war, the Red Army took it to the Soviet Union with other collections and returned it to the Berlin collections in 1958. The affected skull was not identified until 1965 by a museum employee based on old images. An inventory of the condition took place in 1996, after which it was virtually reassembled using computer-aided methods (3D computed tomography ).

Le Moustier 2

The bones of a Neanderthal child discovered by Denis Peyrony in Le Moustier in 1910 have gone down in history as a lucky find. Shortly after the skeleton was presented to the public, however, it inexplicably disappeared en route to Paris for examination, it was believed. It was not until 2002 that a French anthropologist was able to trace the baby skeleton again and finally found it in the Musée National de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil , forgotten in a huge magazine.

Upper Abri

The upper, 4 meter high Abri (also known as the classic cave ) is located on the second terrace about 15 meters above the river level. It was extensively examined in 1930 by Denis Peyrony, who published a very precise description. Its sedimentary sequence contained so-called MTA (Moustérien de tradition acheuléenne) at the base, followed by typical Moustérien , as well as lower and middle Aurignacien . The Abri was once completely filled with sediments. Today the upper abri has been completely cleared out.

Lower Abri

Lower Abri by Le Moustier

The Neanderthal finds by Hauser (1907) and by Peyrony (1910) (youthful Neanderthals - Moustier 1; newborns - Moustier 2) come from this approximately 7-meter-high Abri, which has been scoured by the Vézère and also completely condensed.

The sediment sequence is divided into 12 layers (A to L). The base layers A to C are sterile and consist of river sands, rubble and clays. The river sediments of location D contain unrolled silexes . Moustérien appears for the first time in layer F, followed by MTA in layer G. Layers H and I are sandy and again have unrolled silexes. Typical Moustérien can be found in Lage J, where the two Neanderthals were discovered. The newborn was buried and embedded in layers H to J. Location K houses Moustérien and Châtelperronien . Finally, location L shows remains from the middle Aurignacia.

François Bordes and Maurice Bourgon then tested their typological characterization scheme on this sequence .

On the occasion of an INQUA conference in 1969, H. Laville and Jean Philippe Rigaud revised and refined the stratigraphic information previously given by Peyrony .

Numerous radiometric dates using thermoluminescence and ESR were carried out on the sequence of the lower Abri. The age information obtained is between 56,000 and 40,000 years BP. The lower abri was therefore visited by Neanderthals during the Würm glacial period .

In contrast to the upper Abri, the lower Abri was not completely cleared, part of the sediment package was preserved for later investigations. The type profile is still there, and an artificial replica of it is exhibited.

UNESCO world heritage

As early as 1910, on Peyrony's initiative, the Le Moustier site was acquired by the French state. Since 1979, the two abrises, together with the other prehistoric sites and caves , have been registered with UNESCO as a World Heritage Site , Vézère Valley: Sites and cave paintings .

literature

  • Herbert Ullrich: The Neandertal Adolescent Le Moustier 1: New Aspects, New Results. Berlin Contributions to Prehistory and Early History, Volume 12. National Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage, 2005. ISBN 3886094987
  • Farizy, C. & Vandermeersch, B .: Le Moustier . In: Dictionnaire de la Préhistoire, under the direction of A. Leroi-Gourhan . Presses universitaires de France , Paris 1988.
  • Valladas, H., Geneste, J.-M., Joron, J.-L. et Chadelle, J.-P .: Thermoluminescence dating of Le Moustier (Dordogne, France) . In: Nature . 322, n ° 6078, 1986, p. 452-454 .

Web links

Le Moustier, history of exploration and description of the location

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hermann Klaatsch, Otto Hauser: Homo mousteriensis Hauseri: an ancient diluvial skeleton find in the Dordogne department and its affiliation to the Neanderthal type. Friedrich Vieweg and son, Braunschweig 1909.
  2. ^ Prehistory Department. The new composition of the skull of Homo Mousteriensis Hauseri. In: Official reports from the Royal Art Collections. Volume 34, 1912, No. 1, pp. 2–5
  3. ^ Almut Hoffmann: On the history of the discovery of Le Moustier. Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica, Volume 29, 1997, pp. 7-16.
  4. The skull of Homo Moustériensis Hauseri back in Berlin. Illustration of the skull of " Homo moustériensis Hauseri" in: Praehistorische Zeitschrift. Volume 43–44, issue 1–2, p. 1, doi: 10.1515 / prhz.1966.43-44.1-2.1
  5. JL Thompson, A. Bilsborough: The current state of the Le Moustier 1 skull. Acta Praehistorica et Archaeologica, Volume 29, 1997, pp. 17-38
  6. ^ Marcia S. Ponce De Leon, Christoph PE Zollikofer: New evidence from Le Moustier 1: Computer-assisted reconstruction and morphometry of the skull . In: The Anatomical Record . 254, No. 4, 1999, ISSN  0003-276X , pp. 474-489. doi : 10.1002 / (SICI) 1097-0185 (19990401) 254: 4 <474 :: AID-AR3> 3.0.CO; 2-3 .
  7. JL Thompson, B. Illerhaus: A new reconstruction of the Le Moustier 1 skull and investigation of internal structures using 3-D-μCT data . In: Journal of Human Evolution . 35, No. 6, 1998, ISSN  0047-2484 , pp. 647-665. doi : 10.1006 / jhev.1998.0261 .
  8. Maureille, B .: A lost Neanderthal neonate found . In: Nature . tape 419 , 2002, pp. 33-34 .
  9. Paul Mellars and Rainer Grün: A Comparison of the Electron Spin Resonance and Thermoluminescence Dating Methods: The Results of ESR Dating at Le Moustier (France). In: Cambridge Archaeological Journal. Volume 1, No. 2, 2008, pp. 269-276, doi: 10.1017 / S0959774300000408

Coordinates: 44 ° 59 ′ 38 ″  N , 1 ° 3 ′ 36 ″  E