The Potential of Micromammals for the Stratigraphy and the Timing of Human Occupations at La Roche-à-Pierrot (Saint-Césaire, France)

Brad Gravina,Eugène Morin,Isabelle Crevecoeur,Alexandre Michel,Elise Tartar,Cédric Beauval,Dominique Todisco,Loïc Lebreton,Josserand Marot,Hélène Rougier,Véronique Laroulandie,Damien Flas,François Bachellerie

doi:10.3390/quat4040033

Abstract

As micromammals are highly sensitive to changes in their habitat, variations in species representation are often used to reconstruct local environmental conditions. However, taphonomic aspects of micromammals are often overlooked, despite the fact that they can provide important information for our understanding of archaeological sites. La Roche-à-Pierrot, Saint-Césaire, is a major archaeological site for our understanding of the Middle-to-Upper Palaeolithic transition in Western Europe. Clearly documenting site formation processes, the post-depositional reworking of deposits and the sequence of human occupations is fundamental for providing a secure archaeostratigraphic context of the site. The exceptionally large accumulation of micromammals from recently excavated stratigraphic units at the site makes it possible to track variations in the density of micromammals across the stratigraphic sequence. The taphonomic analysis of micromammals demonstrates these variations are not related to a change in the main accumulation agent or post-depositional phenomena. A negative correlation between small mammal remains and archaeological material suggests that peaks in micromammal densities can potentially be correlated with periods when the site was abandoned or when human occupation was less intense, and therefore provide new data for interpreting the Saint-Césaire stratigraphic sequence.

Highlights

The analysis of micromammals has primarily focused on palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, given their high potential for recording climatic fluctuations [1,2,3,4,5]
Rodents and insectivores, which form the bulk of the small vertebrate accumulation
The micromammal accumulation is dominated by Microtus arvalis/agrestis and Lasiopodomys gregalis (Table 1)

Summary

Introduction

The analysis of micromammals has primarily focused on palaeoenvironmental reconstructions, given their high potential for recording climatic fluctuations [1,2,3,4,5]. The frequent documentation of such biases is due to the fact that micromammal accumulations typically result from the feeding practices of one or more predators and post-depositional phenomena, including the fossilisation process. These biases could affect both palaeocommunities and skeletal part representation, as well as distorting the palaeoecological signal [6,7,8,9,10]. The relationship between micromammals (primarily small rodents and insectivores) and the various categories of archaeological material recovered from a given site has received little attention. Apart from the Chalcolithic site of El Portalón [12], the

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Conclusion