May 25 2009
Horse hunting by ancestors of Ancient Celts?
 Pic: Bronze-Depot.com |
The Archaeozoology blog carries a report about the practice of Paleolithic Horse Hunting and they say:
The site of Roche de Solutre is one of a series of ridges or cuestas in the southern part of the Maconnais region of Burgundy, France. The cuestas are oriented from east to west and are separated by broad valleys with minor streams. The archaeological site at Solutre is located at the base of the southern face of the Roche de Solutre. |
The discoverer and first investigator of the site, Adrien Arcelin, tried to explain the mass of horse bones revealed during the 19th century excavations by describing Palaeolithic hunters driving herds of up to 600 animals at a time over the edge of the rock. This concept of Solutre as a ‘horse-jump’ site found favour in the late 1800s and was upheld even as late as the 1950s. However, in 1956 Jean Combier re-interpreted Solutre as a place to which hunters periodically returned to kill horses which were passing through the valley during their seasonal migrations.
At the beginning of the 1990s, the interpretations could be summarised as follows:
- the site was used almost exclusively as a kill-site, at which horses were the most frequently hunted species of large game, but where reindeer and bison were also occasionally taken.
- small bands of between 6 to 12 horses were intercepted in the valley below Solutre rock and either driven up against the base of the rock and slaughtered there or chased into a corral-like enclosure and killed.
A low proportion of juvenile horses were interpreted as the result of selective killing of adults and releasing of the young. The vast number of individual horses, many articulated remains, the scarcity of butchery evidence and the lack of evidence of transportation of skeletal elements away from the sites suggested that large numbers of horses were killed at any one time and that their intact carcasses were not fully exploited. The minimal butchery may reflect the way in which the horses were hunted. It is suggested that the horses were ambushed as they followed a migratory trail. Hunters would have killed as many horses as possible before the herd panicked and took flight. This method would have produced many carcasses, from which perhaps only a few were selected for further processing. Reindeer, on the other hand, showed more intensive evidence of butchery, indicative of full utilisation of their carcasses.
Read the rest of the article with its references at Archaeozoology.
