Les tombes multiples dans le Néolithique français : aléa statistique ou pratique institutionnalisée ?

Abstract

deaths in these agricultural communities. The various scenarios that have been proposed have little in common apart from their dramatic nature and misuse of ethnographic comparisons. Our new study of multiple burials in the French Early and Middle Neolithic follows three successive yet complementary paths. Firstly, a statistical approach showed that the simultaneous death of two individuals is not improbable: the proportion of double graves conforms to our expectations of prehistoric demography. The number of triple graves, however, is much too high, and the probability of more than three simultaneous natural deaths is nil. Next, archaeological observations were used to look for possible exceptional features in graves with multiple burials. It emerges that there is no distinction between double and single graves from the same context. Graves with four or more burials, on the contrary, display specific arrangements. Triple burials are paradoxical, since they are improbable in demographic terms yet display ordinary archaeological features. This paradox can be resolved by close examination of the cemeteries involved. In fact the demographically exceptional graves match the single graves because all the graves are exceptional here. The association of several multiple graves in the same sites supports this conclusion. Ultimately, leaving aside the few cases involving •catastrophic” events, Early and Middle Neolithic multiple burials are ordinary features within an unusual funerary phenomenon.