Solutrean

The Last Glacial Maximum was a time of scarcity. Bone tools disappeared, charcoal needed for radiocarbon dating became scarce. Horse’s teeth were more common than long bones in sites. Fragments of points were more common than in tact ones. No human remains have been found.

It’s likely bone was burned when Scots Pine wasn’t available. The feeling of deprivation carried over to stone, which was worked and reworked, never left behind until it became unserviceable.

It became so important, it was treated as a ritual medium. Michael Jochim said Solutrean craftsmen selected stones of "particularly high quality and often banded in several colors." Thierry Aubry noted, translucent stone was always chosen for the larger points.

Solutrean stone points went through four forms, beginning with a simple one sharpened on one side of the edge. The second was shaped like a laurel leaf with both sides of the edge sharpened. Then came the willow leaf, and the shouldered point.

Early archaeologists assumed one followed the other. More recently, they’ve found tool styles co-existed, either in the same site or in neighboring ones. That’s probably because each evolved to serve different problems, and each survived so long as it was useful.

Large laurel leaves primarily have been found in France where they may have been used for reindeer. André Leroi-Gourhan thought them too thick to fit on the end of a spear. Instead, they must have been "propelled with great speed."

One possible factor limiting their production to parts of modern France was the availability of material. In the Portuguese Estremadura, craftsmen made smaller laurel leafs by heat treating local stone to made it strong enough for pressure flaking work. The points were more fragile, but then the prey was different in that part of Iberia.

Aubry’s team of experimental knappers found manufacturing large laurel leaves was embedded into a complex economy based on mobility. Tool makers mined flint near Maîtreaux where they used "hammer percussion" to make rough pieces they took back to their work camp near the Massif Central on the upper reaches of the Loire. There they used "organic percussion" to thin and shape their blanks. However, they didn’t apply the finished edges at Maîtreaux.

On the eastern side of the Atlantic-Mediterranean watershed, William Banks believed hunters arrived in the area "prior to the arrival of migratory game animals, refurbished their toolkits, and then moved to Solutré to procure and process game." He noted, that in all the levels hearths appeared with debris from refining the edges and that the crystalline stone was not local.

Bands hunted horses at Solutré so often, the bones were still being used for fertilizer in the nineteenth century. Analysis of those bones suggested they were mainly slain in the spring and fall, probably by being backed against the cliff.

At Fourneau du Diable on the western side of the French watershed, Laure Fontana found reindeer were the primary prey. Does and fawns were slain in winter and spring, males in fall. Adult horses were taken in spring. Foals apparently were spared.

Hunters at Solutré were eating somewhere else in summer and winter. Likewise, the ones at Fourneau spent their summers elsewhere. They may have moved downstream toward moister flood plains. We know they drilled holes in the shells they found, and wore them as ornaments. Beyond the fine stone, they are the only luxury item that has survived.

Notes: I don’t wish to imply bands moved from Maîtreaux to Solutré. Each was in its own ecological network. They are examples of two types of nodes within such a network.

Aubry, Thierry, Miguel Almeida, Maria João Neves, and Bertrand Walter. "Solutrean Laurel Leaf Point Production and Raw Material Procurement During the Last Glacial Maximum in Southern Europe: Two Examples from Central France and Portugal," in Marie Soressi and Harold L. Dibble, Multiple Approaches to the Study of Bifacial Technologies, 2003

_____, _____, _____, _____, et alia. "Solutrean Laurel Leaf Production at Maîtreaux: An Experimental Approach Guided by Techno-economic Analysis," World Archaeology 40:48-66:2008.

Banks, William E. Toolkit Structure and Site Use: Results of a High-Power Use-Wear Analysis of Lithic Assemblages from Solutré (Saône-et-Loire), France, 1996.

Combier, Jean. "Les Fouilles de 1907 à 1925. Mise au Point Strategraphique et Typologique," in M. Thoral, R. Riquet, and J. Combier, Solutré, 1955, cited by Banks. He refuted earlier suggestions the horses were driven off the top of the cliff. He hinted anyone who thought hunters could drive a herd up a steep slope hadn’t been around horses.

Fontana, Laure. "Archaeozoological Study of the Aunal Remains Fourneau du Diable (Bourdeilles, Dordogne): An Example of Potential of Faunal Series Derived from Old Excavations," Paleo 13:159-182:2001.

Jochim, Michael. "The Upper Paleolithic," in Sarunas Milisauskas, European Prehistory, 2001 second edition.

Leroi-Gourhan, André. Les Chasseurs de la Préhistorie, 1983, translated as The Hunters of Prehistory, 1989, by Claire Jacobson.