The Landes de Gascogne (southwest France): periglacial desert and cultural frontier during the Palaeolithic

During the last glacial period, a large part of the Aquitaine basin (southwest France) was a periglacial desert comprising coversands with low-relief dune fields surrounded by loess accumulations. OSL and radiocarbon dates show that the phase of maximum sand deposition coincides with Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 2. Peats and gleyic palaeosoils intercalated within the sands at some sites indicate that vegetation cover was able to develop locally during short events, possibly D–O interstadials, due to raised groundwater levels in interdunal depressions. Few Palaeolithic sites have been discovered in the coversand area in contrast to the peripheral loess region. Systematic survey along a future highway corridor demonstrates that this paucity of sites is not the result of insufficient survey nor deep site burial, but rather reflects an archaeological reality. This strongly suggests that the sand area was not attractive for hunter–gatherer populations due to its reduced levels of water resources, and available vegetation and animal biomass. The distribution of cultural markers such as art items and projectile points also shows that the coversand area probably acted as a barrier separating two different cultural sub-areas, one in the Pyrenees and Cantabria, the other in the Périgord. As a consequence, the commonly accepted view that southwest France, as a whole, served as a refugia during the cold and arid phases of the Pleistocene should be replaced by a more complex one that reflects the fact that a large part of the territory was almost unoccupied and that human populations were concentrated along alluvial valleys.     

La république universellè des francs-maçons entre «culture de la mobilité» et basculement national (XVIIIe–XIXe siècle)

In 1723, the Charter of the Grand Lodge of England defines the project of the Masonic order: to become «the center of the union and the means of tying a faithful friendship among men who without that would have remained at a perpetual distance». From this aspiration to rebuild Babel, proceed the attempts to chart the Masonic Republic, to set up a network of truly universal correspondence and language — this last building site leading to Esperanto. The order developed throughout the XVIII^th century this universal utopia on the mode of a true citizenship of the Masonic Republic with its passport, its rights and its duties. Then it had to answer the formidable upheavals resulting from 1789 and the awakening of nationalities, while being directed towards a more committed design of the universal Republic of the freemasons, sensitive to the liberal ideals and the emancipation of the nations, with the risk of giving arguments to its detractors, convinced of the masonic involvement in a world-wide conspiracy.     

First Obsidian in the Northern French Alps during the Early Neolithic

An exceptional discovery was made in 2013 in the northern French Alps, at the Grande Rivoire site in Sassenage (Isère department): an obsidian bladelet from Sardinia was found in a cultural horizon dated to about 5360–5210 cal b.c. The abundant arrowheads found with it are characteristic of the Early Neolithic in the South of France (Cardial/Epicardial). Yet there was no pottery or domestic fauna, and only discrete markers of farming. The typological, technological and micro-wear analysis of this bladelet, as well as the determination of the origin of the raw material, open new avenues of reflection for the neolithization of the northern Alps, in particular concerning the role played by the Early Neolithic cultures of northern Italy.