Les haches perforées du Néolithique final. L’exemple de Saint-Blaise/Bain des Dames (canton de Neuchâtel, Suisse) : chaîne opératoire et analyse spatiale, des conclusions inédites

Abstract

This article deals with a phenomenon peculiar to the Final Neolithic of the Western Swiss Plateau, the emergence of perforated hammer-axes of Corded-Ware influence. Analysis of the corpus from the lakeside settlement of Saint-Blaise “ Bains des Dames” (Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland) provides new information about these emblematic objects. We can therefore propose new hypotheses regarding this subject in the context of the communities of this region, known as the Three-Lakes. The influence of the Corded-Ware Culture made itself felt at the eastern end of the Swiss Plateau during the second half of the third millennium BC. It then impacted ca. 2700 BC the Late Lüscherz Culture, which was established around the Three-Lakes. As a result of this meeting of cultures, the Auvernier Corded Ware Culture emerged. Houses remain essentially unchanged, but now have refuse tips at one end. The pottery shapes are progressively adapted to eastern models. At the same time, perforated hammer-axes are adopted and develop as a new prestige item. Only known from a few examples on the eastern Swiss sites, they are frequently manufactured in all the villages of the Three-Lakes region. The smaller versions of this artefact, however, have occasionally been considered by researchers as crude copies of those from the Corded-Ware Culture, or else as functional objects. At Saint-Blaise “ Bains des Dames”, hammer-axe production begins in the Early Auvernier Corded-Ware and attains a peak during the Late Auvernier Corded-Ware. Study of the chaîne opératoire shows that strict constraints were attached to the manufacture of these objects. The choice of raw material was restricted to a single variety of serpentinite, used in the form of cobbles. Furthermore, the manufacture of hammer-axes clearly required a greater know-how than that required for the everyday objects. We note that the failurerate is extremely high at every stage of the manufacturing process. Lastly, according to the spatial analysis, it would seem that the manufacture of hammer-axes took place in all the houses. The knowhow was thus mastered in each household. We are thus dealing with manufacture for personal use, undertaken at the household level yet subject to collective constraints. In fact, strong morphological similarities between objects indicate that standards were sometimes followed to within a millimetre. The adaptation of these norms to pebble size, ranging from 10-20 cm in length, explains variation in the size of the hammer-axes. These objects, far from being mediocre copies of an eastern model, are in fact the manifestation of a wellstructured autonomous system. The populations of the Three-Lakes fully adopted the hammer-axe, reinterpreting it to fit the constraints of the raw-material locally available. They thus turned it into an important object of prestige.