SOLUTREAN

This time period is part of the Upper Paleolithic.

Pleistocene :Paleolithic ::Lower Paleolithic ::Middle Paleolithic ::Upper Paleolithic :::Châtelperronian culture :::Aurignacian culture :::Gravettian culture :::Solutrean culture :::Magdalenian culture

Holocene :Mesolithic or Epipaleolithic ::Kebaran culture ::Natufian culture :Neolithic::Halafian culture ::Hassuna culture ::Ubaid culture ::Uruk culture :Chalcolithic

The 'Solutrean' industry was 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. Solutré has been discovered in 1866 by the french geologist and paleontologist Henry Testot-Ferry, second son of a Napoleon's famous cavalryman, the General Claude Testot-Ferry, Baron of the Empire. The makers of Solutrean-style tools used techniques not seen before and not rediscovered for millennia. They also made ornamental beads and bone pins as well as creating prehistoric art.
They produced relatively finely worked, bifacial points using pressure flaking rather than cruder flint knapping. This method permitted 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 or horn was also used.
The name was created 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 work exhibits a transitory stage of art 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 pioneers of this new flint-working technique lived in modern day Spain and their culture seems to disappear from the archaeological record around 15,000 BCE almost as rapidly as it appeared.
Some archaeologists claim similarities between the Solutrean industry and the later Clovis culture / Clovis points of North America, and in a theory known generally as the "Solutrean hypothesis", suggest that the Solutreans crossed the Ice Age Atlantic by moving along the pack ice edge using survival skills similar to that of modern Inuit people. According to the theory, these peoples settled in northeastern North America and eventually became the donor culture for what developed into Clovis tool-making technology. Some challenges to this theory such as 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.

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See also

References

External links

See also

★ Synoptic table of the principal old world prehistoric cultures

★ Franco-Cantabric region

★ Gravettian

References

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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 artifacts