Pierre Pétrequin

Demographic growth, environmental changes and technical adaptations: responses of an agricultural community from the 32nd to the 30th centuries BC.

Abstract In comparison with dryland settlements, peri‐alpine lake‐dwellings of the Neolithic represent an ideal case for the study of population growth and its consequences, owing to the better preservation of organic remains, architectural woods and artefacts. Research has been based on dendrochrono‐logical sequences divided into series of ten to twenty years and on the statistical study of hundreds of thousands of archaeological remains, preserved below the level of the water‐table. For the two lake basins of Chalain and Clairvaux at the end of the fourth millennium BC, direct correlations are proposed between a period of population growth and successive technical and economical adaptations rapidly adopted by agricultural communities trying to temporarily resolve the problems resulting from demographic growth, due in large part to the coming of immigrant populations.

The Production and Circulation of Alpine Jade Axe-Heads during the European Neolithic: Ethnoarchaeological Bases of Their Interpretation

In 2003, the discovery of Neolithic working debris relating to the production of axe-heads of Alpine jade in the Mont Viso Massif, and the study of the European distribution of the products (between the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea) enabled us to propose a different picture of the Neolithic societies of the fifth and early fourth millennia B.C., in which socially significant “object-signs” could circulate over distances up to and exceeding 1800 km from the source (as the crow flies). The current interpretation of this phenomenon proposes that the value of these object-signs was based on the existence of specific ideal concepts relating to mythology and religious belief; these concepts constituted a key element in the exchanges that took place between elites in these profoundly inegalitarian societies.

The adze-heads from Plemięta, Grudziądz district (Poland): Alpine jades, Armorican products and very long-distance exchanges

Discovered in the 19th century, the hoard from Plemieta (Chelmno county, Poland) consisted of three polished adze-heads, of which two are in the Museum in Grudziądz. Until now, this hoard had been assumed to be linked to Danubian farming communities. A petrographic approach coupled with an in-depth, Europe-wide typological study allows us to rethink this cultural attribution. In fact, the Plemieta adze-heads had very probably been made in the Armorican massif (France), produced by specialists directly influenced by the standards of the earliest adze-heads of Alpine jades from Mont Viso in the Italian Alps. This proposition, which is supported by other examples of adze- and axeheads that had probably been imported into southern Scandinavia from France, re-invigorates the hypothesis that there had been western Europeaninfluences on communities of the Eastern TRB Group, pertaining to the circulation of ‘object-signs’ andideas over distances exceeding 1500 km as the crow flies. Key words: Plemieta, Chelmno county, Alpine jades, Begude type adze-head, the Funnel Beaker culture.