Solutrean
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| This time period is part of the Upper Paleolithic. |
Pleistocene
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| Holocene |
The Solutrean industry is a relatively advanced flint tool-making style of the Upper Palaeolithic.
It is named after the type-site of Solutré in the Mâcon district, Saône-et-Loire, eastern France and appeared around 19,000 BCE. The Solutré site was discovered in 1866 by the French geologist and paleontologist Henry Testot-Ferry (second son of Napoleon's famous cavalryman, the General Claude Testot-Ferry, Baron of the Empire). Solutrean tool-making employed techniques not seen before and not rediscovered for millennia. The era's finds also include ornamental beads and bone pins as well as prehistoric art.
The Solutrean has relatively finely worked, bifacial points made with pressure flaking rather than cruder flint knapping. This method permitted the working of delicate slivers of flint to make light projectiles and even elaborate barbed and tanged arrowheads.
Large thin spear-heads; scrapers with edge not on the side but on the end; flint knives and saws, but all still chipped, not ground or polished; long spear-points, with tang and shoulder on one side only, are also characteristic implements of this industry. Bone and antler were used as well.
The industry was named by Gabriel de Mortillet to describe the second stage of his system of cave chronology, following the Mousterian, and he considered it synchronous with the third division of the Quaternary period.
The Solutrean may be seen as a transitory stage between the flint implements of the Mousterian and the bone implements of the Magdalenian epochs. Faunal finds include horse, reindeer, mammoth, cave lion, rhinoceros, bear and aurochs. Solutrean finds have been also made in the caves of Les Eyzies and Laugerie Haute, and in the Lower Beds of Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire, England. The industry first appeared in modern-day Spain and disappears from the archaeological record around 15,000 BCE.
Some archaeologists claim similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America. In a theory known generally as the "Solutrean hypothesis", they suggest that people with Solutrean flint technology crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using survival skills similar to that of modern Eskimo people. According to this hypothesis, the migrants settled in northeastern North America and eventually developed Clovis tool-making technology. Challenges to this theory include large gaps in time between the Clovis and Solutrean eras, a lack of evidence of Solutrean familiarity with sea navigation, differences in Clovis technology, etc. The theory of a Clovis-Solutrean link remains controversial and does not enjoy wide acceptance.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
[edit] External links
- Clovis and Solutrean: Is There a Common Thread? by James M. Chandler
- Stone Age Columbus BBC TV programme summary
- "America's Stone Age Explorers" transcript of 2004 NOVA program on PBS
- Images of Solutrean artifactsca:Solutrià
cs:Solutréen de:Solutréen es:Solutrense fr:Solutréen nl:Solutréen oc:Solutrean pl:Kultura solutrejska ru:Солютрейская культура fi:Solutrén kulttuuri sv:Solutréenkulturen uk:Солютрейська культура
