Archaeologists say it frequently, sometimes with undisguised malice: their job is often to explore the dustbins of the past because nothing speaks better of an ancient society than its rubbish. But it also happens that today’s garbage cans indirectly give work to these researchers, as is the case in Bellegarde, in the Gard, where the extension of a well-known waste treatment and burial center led to an extraordinary excavation, carried out by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) in 2016. months during which a total of seventy people visited the site – by the period covered – twenty-two millennia – and by the discovery of rare prehistoric engraved plaques, presented to the press on Thursday 30 March.
“We have the remains of the daily life of human groups for twenty-two thousand yearssummarizes Marilyne Bovagne, archaeologist at Inrap and responsible for the operation. All the major periods were represented during the preliminary survey carried out in 2015: the Upper Palaeolithic, the Neolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, Antiquity, the Middle Ages… There is even an orchard dating from the 16the century. » All eras combined, a thousand structures were unearthed during the excavations.
Located at the foot of the Costières, this site has never ceased to be attractive, probably because of the source which supplies it with water but also because of its natural resources: wood, game, presence of clay which will be used by potters (two ancient twin ovens have been discovered) and pebbles of flint, precious for prehistoric humans, who kept coming back, for millennia, to this open-air camp. For them, the location overlooking the Camargue was strategic “to observe the passage of the herds of herbivores – horses and reindeer – which were hunted at the time”, specifies Vincent Mourre, prehistorian at Inrap and deputy head of the excavations carried out at Bellegarde.
As indicated by carbon 14 dating, we are 20,000 years before our era, at the very beginning of the Magdalenian (one of the subdivisions of the Upper Paleolithic). “This term brings together a set of cultural expressions whose focus is in the south-west of France, with an extension to the Rhône, and which will subsequently go from the Iberian Peninsula to Poland”, explains Vincent Mourre. The Magdalenian is characterized by the exploitation of the reindeer – mammal of the cold zones, but we are then close to the last glacial maximum –, very specific carved flints, with in particular very thin blades, an industry in hard animal materials (cervid antlers and bones) and, of course, artistic representations, the best known of which is the Lascaux cave.
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