Les enceintes fossoyées néolithiques

Recent excavations in the causeway enclosures in the Charente Basin are providing an opportunity to review the chronological and functional problems and queries concerning this type of site. However the numerous questions are still largely outnumbered by the newly acquired answers. Set mostly on gentle hills and often circular, they are in number well over one hundred. Showing multiple occupations, severely eroded, their palimpsest plans have been altered even modified preventing to associate with certainty a type of plan to a precise cultural phase. Amongst these indecipherable plans we tentatively suggest to distinguish two broad categories based on one part on the space bound modality (either only human or adapted to landscape availability) and on the other of the plan of enclosures (single enclosure, enclosure divided in two zones and adjoined or imbricated enclosures). These enclosures have often preserved, albeit slight, indication of reorganisation of entrances of which the so-called " crab-claws " are the most spectacular. The segmented ditches were essentially meant to be used as quarries to meet a permanent need of material for the repairing of banks or ramparts and this accounts for their strictly adhesion to the original plan. The infillings, natural or human, are difficult to interpret as ditches were often re-cut for a secondary use such as burial place. The artefacts can result from deliberate deposits, not easy to prove, or remnants of activity in or in proximity of the ditch, but most of the time indicate rubbish disposals. Before the Artenac we do not have direct testimony of banks or ramparts but empty spaces along the inner side of ditches indirectly suggest their existence. Built structures or place of human activities, which certainly were present inside the enclosures, are completely unknown. When buildings have been recognised their strict association with the causeways is not demonstrated. Finally we have to insist on the fact that so far no causeway nor the total area of an enclosure have been entirely excavated

Archaeology · Civil engineering · Ditch · Geography · Infill · Natural (archaeology · Plan (archaeology · Archaeological and Geological Studies · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies · Engineering · History · Architecture · Ecology · Geology

• Thickness Estimation of the Soil‐Sedimentary Cover Inside Causewayed Enclosures to Locate an Occupation Layer

  Open Access•Guillaume Bruniaux, Marylise Onfray et al.•Archaeological Prospection•2024

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• L’habitat du Néolithique final de Quinssaines, Le Bournadiau

  Sylvie Saintot, Jimmy Linton et al.•Bulletin de la Société…•2011

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