The Palaeolithic

The Creuse valley began to form at the beginning of the Quaternary period. The alluvial deposits of sand and quartz pebbles transported downstream by the river at that time, today lie about a hundred metres below the riverbed.

It was on these alluvial deposits, in a temperate climate and a forested landscape dominated by chestnut trees (between 20 & 40% of recovered pollen samples), that the first men made several attempts to inhabit the area, leaving behind them numerous traces of broken quartz and basic tools.

The remains of an early camp has been unearthed at Lavaud in Eguzon. The floor, lined with stones, was probably sheltered by a framework of branches covered with animal skins. Post-holes and the accumulation of debris found around the edges of the dwelling would suggest that the walls were flexible.

This hut has been scrupulously recreated respecting all the data from the dig.

The tools found on the floor of this camp, located at the foot of the highest escarpment of the valley, date from around one million years ago. The techniques used to produce these ancient tools have been determined through experimentation. The quartz pebbles were shaped at one end or broken using another pebble as a hammer.

Seams of quartz were broken on a stone anvil which was found still in its original position on the floor of the hut. The pieces were used directly or retouched and transformed into tools such as scrapers, piercers and borers.

No bone remains of hunted game have been preserved in the acid clay soil.

Achulean Industries

These objects were discovered on the surface or in the soil of the lower ridges of the Creuse and Bouzanne valleys and the surrounding plateaux.

Known as bifaces, they were useful tools with a long cutting edge more evolved than the retouched pebbles which were progressively replaced.

Bifaces were essentially almond-shaped, entirely retouched on both sides and appeared around the same period as the new technique of debitage, a Levallois method of stone-working which allowed the production of specifically sized and shaped flakes starting from a block of raw material.

Contemporary with the first use of fire, the biface and the debitage technique were used until the end of the Middle Palaeolithic, about 40,000 BC.

The Upper Palaeolithic

During the last (Würm) ice age, the Creuse valley served as a refuge for hunters and for herds of animals which had had to abandon their habitats around the edges of the glacial ice sheet which covered Northern Europe or in the frozen mountains.

The majority of the grottoes, shelters and open-air camps were inhabited for very long periods of time during the Aurignacian, Solutrean and Magdalenian periods. They appear to have been used as temporary resting places between the sites of the Parisian Basin and those of the Massif Centrale, the Poitou and the Dordogne.

A Solutrean hunting hide at Fressignes

A remarkable collection of Upper Solutrean tools was unearthed from the floor of an encampment dating from around 17,000 BC, sited on a protected ledge overlooking the gorge opened by the Creuse in the micaceous schist and amphibolite deposits below Fressignes.

The excavation of this open-air Solutrean camp, the first explored in the area, revealed a number of flint and quartz tools, the only items to have been preserved in the acid soil.

The twenty different kinds of flint discovered here originated in many different deposits up to 100 kms further down the Creuse valley. Others, rarer, come from sedimentary lands up to 60 kms north and 35 kms east. But it is the variety of the tools - piercers, borers, barbed projectile points, burins - and the quality of the shaping, resulting in translucent bifacial, leaf-shaped tools, which catch the eye.

The Abri Fritsch at Pouligny-Saint-Pierre

Situated a few kilometres downstream from the Le Blanc parish, this shelter, discovered in 1957 by René Fritsch, contains layers of clay infill and limestone blocks to a height of three metres in which hunters lived at a dozen different points in time between 17,250 and 13,500 BC.

On one level of the interior a selection of Solutrean tools was discovered and, on other levels, a very different selection of stone and bone workings attributed to the early Magdalenian inhabitants was found. Amongst these tools in flint, limestone and quartz were a variety of scrapers, burins with truncations or notches and splintered items.

These latter served to split wood - branches and small trunks - that the burins would then allow to be grooved. Reindeer horn would be broken with a stone hammer and the larger splinters would be shaped into wide, flat assegais with flint scrapers on the side of a wooden log.

The Solutreans, who occupied layers 10, 9 and 8 of the Abri Fritsch had to withstand the withering cold and a major drought, both of which contributed to the disappearance of trees from the steppe.

Following this era of intense glaciation, after a more temperate and humid interval, periods of dry cold returned during the Würm IV period of the ice age when the steppe reappeared with rare and leafy trees such as willow, hazelnut and alder near the river.

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The excavation at the Abri Fritsch has furnished some extremely precise information on the climate, flora and fauna that existed during the Badegoulian, period dated to 16,030 ± 550 BC. Wildlife proliferated in the area round the shelter. Certain species such as the horse and the aurochs (a breed of longhorn cattle) adapted to the rigorous conditions. Many, like the reindeer, arctic fox, wolverine and snowy owl, arrived from the north whilst others, like the lemming and vole, came from the Siberian tundra and the ibex moved down from the frozen mountains.

The early humans managed these natural resource remarkably well, using the reindeer, the horse and other large mammals for nourishment and the fur from carnivores to protect themselves from the cold. The presence of numerous sewing needles on the site suggests just how much importance was placed on the making of clothing and covers.

Radiocarbon analysis of the charcoal from the hearths has allowed us to establish an exact and coherent chronology for the majority of the habitational layers between 17,250 and 13,500 BC and their corresponding climatic conditions.

The La Garenne grottoes at Saint-Marcel

The Magdalenians, inhabiting the grottoes and shelters on the La Garenne hillside during the following millennium, perfected techniques of fishing and hunting.

Living in the same harsh climate as the Badegoulians, they hunted the same prey, the reindeer, the horse, the antelope and the wolf.

The remains of a dozen massacres of aurochs with axe blows to the forehead bear testament to the ability of the Magdalenians hunting in groups to be able to immobilise and then kill these immense animals at a single stroke.

Their weapons were often decorated with stylised motifs, engraved with burin, with fish, geometrical patterns and phallic extremities.

Items of self-embellishment such as shells, fossils and pendants were often coloured with ochre and sewn onto skin or fur clothes.

The indispensable lighting for the realisation of all these different jobs would have been supplied by the flames of the fire and lamps. Large numbers of lamps have been found in the locations where they dealt with the basic materials and on several rocky ledges.