‘Cicéron c’est Poincaré’.

Abstract

To see graves as houses of the dead is a cliche in archaeology. One can even say it is a normal way of speaking, regarding the grave: we go to a cemetery to visit our (deceased) relatives. Apart from this figurative language, to what extent can the parallel be made? In the very case of the Neolithic, it is some times proposed that the first monumental constructions for the select or token chosen dead (ancestors) may replicate, not only houses of the living, but those of their ancestors. By good fortune, the first monuments are often elongated, as were houses of early agricultural communities in Central Europe. The oldest monumental cemeteries are located in northern France with what is known as the Passy phenomenon, from the second quarter of the 5th millennium BC. The number of constructions, the typology of the monuments and the organisation of the cemeteries may vary but considering these complexes as a whole there is great similarity. Some of the monuments are trapezoidal, but there is a large range of variability in ground plan, from round to extreme elongation (more than 350 m). Trapezoidal forms were also highlighted due to the superposition, at Balloy, of two (or three) monuments on the denuded remains of LBK houses, their ground plan obviously still present at the time. What seemed to be even more significant was the choice of Rubane houses instead of the Villeneuve-Saint-Germain type, perhaps as they were closer in time; that may suggest that the first farmers still held a special status in the ideology of the following communities. Unfortunately, 30 years after the Balloy excavation, this case of superposition remains unique. In fact, another case has been noted on the site of Vignely, but here the monument is much more recent (ca. 3800-3600 BC). Hundreds of house plans are known from the early Neolithic, and the Balloy cases appear quite anecdotal in this context. Moreover, Passy type monuments and cemeteries have been discovered in areas where LBK settlements are scarce, like Normandy, or totally unknown, like the Bugey (east of Lyon). More generally, and simplistically the morphology of monuments can be reduced to simple geometrical shapes: round, trapeze, rectangle. Symmetrically, houses occur in the same shapes - round or square - during Neolithic times… so?