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La Madeleine

La Madeleine is the type site of the Magdalenian industry of the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe, about 16,000–10,000 b.c. The rock shelter lies on the outskirts of Les Eyzies in the Perigord region of southwestern france and was excavated in the mid-nineteenth century by édouard lartet and henry christy. The site yielded stone and bone tools of distinctive form, but it is most notable for producing evidence of mobiliary (portable or parietal) art in the form of carved and incised bone, antler, stone, and ivory. The people who made these are referred to as Magdalenian and they hunted deer or ibex.

Tim Murray

See also

Breuil, Henri; Lithic Analysis

References

Gamble, C. 1986. The Paleolithic Settlement of Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

La Tène

The eponymous site of the later phase of Iron Age civilization (500 b.c. until the Roman Conquest) of La Tène, switzerland, covers the whole of Celtic Europe. Discovered in 1857 by Hans Kopp, who “fished” for Friedrich Schwab, the archaeologist of Bienne, the site was first considered to be a lake dwelling based on examples of Stone and Bronze Age villages on the Swiss lakes. Such an interpretation had the advantage of extending the custom of lake dwelling, which was felt to be specifically Swiss, until the Roman occupation.

In no time, La Tène achieved international fame. In 1872, hans hildebrand suggested giving the name to a specific culture of the Iron Age, and the definition was ratified by an international congress held in Stockholm in 1874. Hildebrand, however, attributed the differences between the two cultures that he had defined, Hallstatt (early Iron Age) and La Tène (later Iron Age), to geographical variation. It was edouard desor, an archaeologist and geologist from Neuchâtel, who deserves all the credit of having, as early as 1865 (and more explicitly in 1868), clearly established a chronological succession for the Iron Age. This feat was achieved by means of comparisons with Tiefenau (Bern), Alesia (France), and the Celtic site of Marzabotto (northern Italy) on the one hand and the burial mounds of the Swiss Neuchâtel area and the Austrian burial place of Hallstatt on the other.

The site of La Tène includes two bridges, named Vouga and Desor after the early excavators. The bridges crossed a lateral, little active (or maybe dead) arm of the river Thielle, which was totally filled in when discovered. The bridges are near the Thielle’s egress from Lake Neuchâtel, which is linked by this river to Lake Bienne. The river separates the foothills of the Jura mountain chain from the Swiss plateau, and this archaeologically rich site has seen successive excavations. Unfortunately, some of the work has not been a credit to Swiss archaeology. During the fifty years following La Tène’s discovery, looting of the site was more common than archaeological research, particularly during the first Jura Surface Waters Regulation Scheme (1869–1883), which lowered water levels by 2.70 meters and left the surface of the site exposed.

The difficulty of excavating the site, by dragging or fishing and then by excavating in the water,