Œuvres d’art méconnues de la grotte du Mas d’Azil (Ariège). Les aurochs « mal définis » de la collection Marthe et Saint-Just Péquart. Musée d’Archéologie nationale

Abstract

The left bank of the Arize has a particularly important place in the history of the Mas d’Azil cave, as it was on this hundred-meter-long terrace that Édouard Piette (1827–1906) first recognised the Azilian period (between 14,500 and 12,000 cal BP) in 1889. Beneath this Azilian horizon, a flood silt nearly 6 centimeters thick yielded various lenses of Magdalenian artefacts, more or less disturbed, some evoking the Upper Magdalenian, others the Middle Magdalenian (between around 18,000 and 14,000 years ago). Between 1935 and 1937, following upheavals in the cave ten years earlier, Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart resumed the Piette excavations in order to identify the Azilian horizon on this left bank and study its stratigraphy. The two bone fragments from these excavations presented in this article, each engraved with a representation of an aurochs, have rarely been published, let alone studied. It is an analysis of the graphic conventions developed by the representations of these two bovids, which are quite different from the rest of the Magdalenian corpus that leads us to question their chrono-cultural attribution. Could these objects be the work of the last Magdalenians, or even the first Azilians in the Mas d’Azil cave? The archaeostratigraphically unsatisfactory conditions in which they were found provide an opportunity for renewed discussion of their stratigraphic origin, and in so doing of the cultural affiliations of their authors. H. Delporte attributes them to an ‘ill-defined Magdalenian’, without however specifying the origin or the reasons for this attribution. As the left bank of the site has been extensively disturbed by successive excavation campaigns (Piette between 1887 and 1894, Breuil in 1901 and 1902), it cannot be ruled out that these two pieces may come from levels other than those envisaged by H. Delporte, and why not from the Azilian. A certain degree of kinship seems to link them with other known works from the post-Magdalenian figurative corpus, within the Azilo-Laborian techno-complexes, at the Paleo-Mesolithic junction. Some of their other graphic characteristics reflect a gradual dilution of Magdalenian art towards new expressive repertoires. The formal singularities and graphic codes of these two representations show us the extreme porosity of styles at the end of the Tardiglacial period. The various analyses and interpretations proposed here are based on new discoveries relating to this Tardiglacial art. The results of the collective research program ‘Archives of a cave: from paleoenvironmental and paleolithic archaeological archives to excavation archives (Mas d’Azil cave, Ariège)’, led by Marc Jarry, Laurent Bruxelles, Céline Pallier (INRAP) and François Bon (UMR Traces–University of Toulouse) since 2018, may also help to confirm their location within the stratigraphy of the site.