Les dépôts de palets et de disques en schiste du Néolithique ancien : des stocks de produits semi-ouvrés ? Oui, mais encore ? (Précisions pratiques avec le savoir-faire ancestral des fendeurs manuels d'ardoise dans les Massifs armoricain et ardennais)

Abstract

Ethnographic comparatism is now a classical tool in attempts to clarify prehistoric populations’ patterns of stone-cutting. Without looking for other technical cultures throughout the world, the archaism of the manual production of roofing slates, more or less patent in France until the nineteenth or twentieth century in the slate quarries in the Armorican and Ardennes massifs, becomes a way to improve understanding of the laborious making of slate schist rings by the first Bliquy/ Villeneuve-Saint-Germain craftsmen in the fifth millennium BC. The comparison is all the more interesting in that some of the Neolithic and contemporary slate schist probably comes from the same outcrops, simply quarried from different depths, so their qualities differ but not their properties. The same goes for the historical development of slate-splitting manual tools which is more the result of the metallic transformation of parts of the instruments than the emergence of new types of tools, always used by thrown and posed percussion. It is thus quite possible that, splitting and knapping slate schist in the same way by means of equally rudimentary techniques, craftsmen of each age and area reached very similar technological answers. That implies comparing grouped finds of Neolithic discs and «quoits» with traditional slate-splitters’ stocks, although without really knowing the modes of storage, due to lack of archaeological indications with good reason, when we see the simple and precarious empirical practices used by the roofing slate-splitters to retain the required degree of humidity in their slabs of slate…