Going further in flint studies with the “chaine evolutive” concept.

Abstract : Studies on the origin of lithic raw materials became increasingly important since the 1980’s. Sourcing studies play a key role in appreciating territory exploitation and group mobility, which are major issues of prehistoric societies understanding. However, most approaches exploited only part of the information potentially carried by the lithic material. The improvement of our understanding of flint nature and formation processes allowed our interdisciplinary research-group to refine the methods used for its characterization. A major aspect of this renewal is the “chaîne évolutive”concept. Our work opens up new research directions such as surface analysis of flint artefacts, which reinforces the taphonomic study of archaeological sites and questions their integrity. We present several types of surface analyses conducted on two archaeological assemblages from south-western France : 1) a Mousterian and Chatelperronian assemblage from H. Delporte’s excavations at La Ferrassie (Dordogne) and 2) a Mousterian assemblage from the open air site of Dirac (Charente). In the first case, the analyses allowed to distinguish in a single archaeological unit two sets of flints that had not been previously separated. In the second case, our approach established the geological history of flints prior to their collection by humans and characterized the successive events which affected the knapped objects after they were discarded.