"The amazing Venus of the Upper Paleolithic" , this is how their discoverers have described the small statuette of more than 23,000 years sculpted in exceptionally preserved stone and which has been a valuable testimony about the society of the late Paleolithic.
Discovered this summer, the Venus, presented this Wednesday, closes a beautiful series of 15 statuettes found in the prehistoric site of Renancourt , in a district southwest of Amiens, excavated since 2014. The Venus stands out for its good state of conservation and quality of its finishes.
"Like all the beautiful discoveries, it was found in the last days of the excavations, in the last square meters" of the plot in question, explained Clément Paris , director of excavations of Inrap (National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research).
Four small centimeters carved in chalk , representing a naked woman "esteatopyge", buttocks, breasts and thighs hypertrophied but with arms simply drawn and cut at the knees. His face without a line is framed by a hat finely carved in square flint: a stylistic detail that echoes the famous hooded ladies Brassempouy (Landes) and Willendorf (Austria) .
"It's amazing!" Said Alain Gest, president of Amiens Métropole, who will baptize a street in the district as "The Venus of Renancourt . " "This is the type of document that will be found in textbooks," said Dominique Garcia, president of Inrap.
"We find the canons of the art of the time," he added, "what surprises us is the unity of the representations," identifiable in the other, always feminine, gravettian-style figurines found throughout the world. Europe, from the Pyrenees to Siberia.
The gravetiana culture developed in Europe between 28,000 and 22,000 , in the Upper Paleolithic, a very little documented period. The Renancourt site is one of the rare evidence of the presence of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in northern France, a region known for its archaeological wealth despite the absence of caves.
A manufacturing workshop?
Nomadic hunter-gatherers lived there in the camp. It was then in the middle of the ice age (the Scandinavian glacier was only one hundred kilometers from the Somme) and people would have benefited from a "microclimatic improvement" to settle in these steppe landscapes inhabited by mammoths, woolly rhinoceros, hares .. .
In addition to the statues, archaeologists have discovered many remains on this site: animal bones, tools, ornaments ... All very well preserved at a depth of 4 meters underground thanks to the silt.
Why did these hunters carve these "Venus"? Several interpretations are possible, but the hypothesis presented is that of a workshop manufacturing objects on the ground, which would explain this series. The fact that the same stylistic characteristics are found elsewhere suggests a diffusion, or at least a contact between populations.
These Venus could mean "a symbolic expression of women and more particularly of fertility," according to Clément Paris. For a ritual? Again, nothing is decided.
Until 2014, only 15 figurines carved by the Gravettians had been found in France, the last excavation dates from 1959. A site near Renancourt was excavated in 1910, but the collection that the prehistoric Victor Commont had harvested was lost after his death.
"In a few years we have doubled the number of statuettes," which are now 30 in France and 100 throughout Europe, said Clément Paris. And unlike the excavations of the 1950s "done in a rather brutal way," modern excavation techniques should allow "to understand the place of these objects within the habitat," archaeologist hopes.
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