The Azilian is a Mesolithic industry of the Franco-Cantabrian region of northern Spain and Southern France. It dates approximately 10,000–12,500 years ago.[ Diagnostic artifacts from the culture include projectile points (microliths with rounded retouched backs), crude flat bone and pebbles with abstract decoration. The latter were first found in the River Arize at the type-site for the culture, the Grotte du Mas d'Azil at Le Mas-d'Azil in the French Pyrenees (illustrated, now with a modern road running through it). These are the main type of Azilian art, showing a great reduction in scale and complexity from the Magdalenian Art of the Upper Palaeolithic.]
The industry can be classified as part of the Epipaleolithic or the Mesolithic periods, or of both. Archaeologists think the Azilian represents the tail end of the Magdalenian as the warming climate brought about changes in human behaviour in the area. The effects of melting ice sheets would have diminished the food supply and probably impoverished the previously well-fed Magdalenian manufacturers, or at least those who had not followed the herds of horse and reindeer out of the glacial refugium to new territory. As a result, Azilian tools and art were cruder and less expansive than their Ice Age predecessors - or simply different.
People associated with the Azilian are genetically different from the preceding Magdalenian peoples, instead being related to peoples from who produced the Epigravettian culture as part of the Villabruna/Western Hunter Gatherer ancestry cluster,
Terminology
, c. 12,000 BP.
]]The Azilian was named by Édouard Piette, who excavated the Mas d'Azil type-site in 1887. Unlike other coinages by Piette, the name was generally accepted, indeed in the early 20th century used for much greater areas than it is today. Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History and a palaeontologist rather than an archaeologist, was taken around the sites by leading excavators such as
Hugo Obermaier. The popularizing book he published in 1916,
Men of the Old Stone Age talks happily of Azilian sites as far north as
Oban in Scotland, wherever flattened barbed "harpoon" points of deer antler are found.
[Osborn, Obermaier and others thanked in the Preface ix-x, Piette's excavation described 460, Scottish "stations" 475][Oban is also given as an Azilian site in Prehistory: A Study of Early Cultures in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin by M. C. Burkitt, p. 115-116, originally 1921, reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2012, , 9781107696846; Map from a 1932 book showing British "Azilian" sites]
Subsequently, Azilian types of artefact have been defined more precisely, and similar examples from beyond the Franco-Cantabrian region generally excluded and reassigned, although references to "Azilian" finds much further north than the Franco-Cantabrian region still appear in non-specialized sources. Terms like "Azilian-like" and even "epi-Azilian" may be used to describe such finds.
Characteristics
The Azilian in
Vasco-Cantabria occupied a similar region to the
Magdalenian, and in very many cases the same sites; typically the Azilian remains are fewer, and rather simpler, than those from the Magdalenian occupation beneath, indicative of a smaller group of people. As the glaciers retreated, sites increasingly reach into the slopes of the Cantabrian Mountains as high as 1,000 metres above sea level, though presumably the higher ones were only occupied in the summers. The grand cavern at Mas d'Azil is not entirely typical of Azilian sites, many of which are shallow shelters at the bottom of a rock face.
Azilian pebbles
Painted, and sometimes
engraving pebbles (or "cobbles") are a feature of core Azilian sites; some 37 sites have produced them. The decoration is simple patterns of dots, zig-zags, and stripes, with some crosses or hatching, normally just on one side of the pebble, which is usually thin and flattish, and some 4 to 10 cm across. Large numbers may be found at a site. The colours are usually red from
iron oxide, or sometimes black; the paint was often mixed in
Pecten saltwater
scallop shells, even at Mas d'Azil, which is far from the sea. Attempts to find a meaning for their
iconography have not got very far, although "the repeated combinations of motifs does seem to some extent to be ordered, which may suggest a simple syntax". Such attempts began with Piette, who believed the pebbles carried a primitive writing system.
Neighbours
The Azilian culture coexisted with similar early Mesolithic European cultures, such as the Federmesser in northern Europe, the Tjongerian in the
Low Countries, the Romanellian culture of
Italy, the
Creswellian in Britain and the Clisurian in
Romania (in a process called azilianization).
In its late phase, it experienced strong influences from the neighbouring Tardenoisian, reflected in the presence of many geometrical . The Azilian culture persisted until the arrival of the Neolithic Europe Era.[A. Moure, El origen del hombre, 1999. ][F. Jordá Cerdá et al., Historia de España 1: Prehistoria, 1989. ][X. Peñalver, Euskal Herria en la Prehistoria, 1996. ] The Asturian culture in the area to the west along the coast was also similar, but added a distinctive form of pick-axe to its toolkit.
Gallery
File:Harpon 2010.0.3.5. Global.JPG|Harpoon – Mas d'Azil – Museum de Toulouse
File:Pointe 228.2 La Tourasse (3).jpg|Azilian point - Tourasse Cave – Museum de Toulouse
File:Galet peint MHNT.PRE.2006.0.93.jpg|Painted pebble – Mas d'Azil – Museum de Toulouse
File:Galet peint Mas d'Azil - MAN 58.jpg
File:Galets peints Mas d'Azil - MAN 61 62 63.jpg
File:MAN - Station du mas d'Azil - galets peints (2).jpg
File:Galet peint Mas d'Azil - MAN 57.jpg
File:Galets peints Mas d'Azil - MAN 61 62 64 65.jpg
File:Galet peint MHNT.PRE.MAZ.15.jpg
File:Fragment osseux peint du Mas d'Azil - MAN.jpg
File:Harpon 2010.0.3.5. Global simple.JPG
File:MAN - Station du mas d'Azil - galets peints (7).jpg
In Southern Iberia
A culture very similar to the Azilian spread as well into Mediterranean Spain and southern Portugal. Because it lacked
bone industry it is named distinctively as
Iberian microlaminar microlithism. It was replaced by the so-called
geometrical microlithism related to Sauveterrian culture.
Genetics
In a genetic study published in 2014, the remains of an Azilian male from the Grotte du Bichon were examined. He was found to be carrying the paternal haplogroup I2 and the maternal haplogroup U5b1h.
Villalba-Mouco et al examined the remains of two males of the Azilian culture buried at the Late Upper Paleolithic site of Balma de Guilanyà, Catalonia, Spain c. 11,380-9,990 BC. They were found to be carrying the paternal haplogroups I and C1a1a, and the maternal haplogroups U5b2a and U2'3'4'7'8'9. They consisted of a mixture of ancestry between people from the preceding Magdalenian culture, as well as Villabruna/Western Hunter-Gatherer cluster, which shares affinities to people from the Middle East and Caucasus.
See also
Sources
External links
