Durance Valley Research Articles

Les formations quaternaires de la rive gauche de la Moyenne Durance, des Mées à Oraison (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence)

In the middle Durance valley, between the villages of Les Mées and Oraison, eight quaternary level terraces have been identificated. The older alluvial surface, consisting on quartzit pebbles, and situated on the height level of the Valensole tableland in conformity with the pliocene top, is an early quaternary formation. Pebbles tools have been discovered on ground level. The other terraces below can be respectivly attribuated to the Giinz, Mindel, Riss and Wurm glaciations.

JOSEPH D’ARBAUD, POET OF THE CAMARGUE

1974 marks the centenary of the birth of an important Proven~al author, Joseph D'Arbaud, who not only wrote in Proven9al but himself 'translated' his own work into Modem French (which he also spoke and wrote as a native tongue). Like Mistral, who wrote a foreword in 1913 to D'Arbaud's volume of verse Le Laurier d'Arles, D'Arbaud lived and wrote all his life in terms of Proven~al values: he was a 'Majoral' of the Felibrige, son of a well-known Proven~al poetess, Marie D' Arbaud, and editor, with Emile Sicard, of a long-lived local review, Le Fleu. What is even more interesting, and quite characteristic of the man, is that, though born in the sunny Durance valley at Meyrargues and educated at A vignon and Aix-en-Provence, he deliberately turned his back on conventional city living to go and settle, for quite a number of years, as a manadier or cattle ranch owner, near Fos, in the Camargue, the vast, flat, salty reach of country that makes up the Rhone delta. And it is the Camargue that is the basic inspiration of his work. Today's Camargue is on the way to becoming a rice-bowl. In D' Arb aud's time, not so very long ago, it remained, and in the western reaches still is, a blistered, wind-scorched tract, a home for herds of horses and bulls, a haunt of flamingoes and herons and sea-gulls. Landscape here is a long horizon of reeds, tamarisks and stunted trees, topped by a huge architecture of scudding clouds driven by the unceasing winds. For this area is the homeland of the winds: there is nothing to stop them. They rage in from the Rhone valley or the Atlantic or Mediterranean, whip the great etangs into spindrift, flatten the reeds and thickets into prostrate obedience and parch the cracked soil into salty barrenness. The herdsmen's cabanes, thatched and squat, present their rounded roofs to the blast and weather the storms. The birds have the shelter of marsh grasses and stunted shrubs, or of canal banks, but the stallions and bulls, come wind, come weather, seem to be quite hardened to the wildest of wild elements, and to be themselves just as wild. They roam and pasture freely over a far-extending, unfenced wilderness, and their only restraint is the periodical round-up by the herdsmen or gardians, armed with their tridents and mounted on the fast, white horses, tireless and alert, which are the special glory of the Camargue. It is no country for weaklings:

Essai de coordination des formations quaternaires de la Moyenne Durance et du Haut-Drac (Hautes-Alpes)

Cummunication was established between the high valley of the Drac and the Durance valley at the time when the glaciers spread out above the Bayard pass. This region is therefore of particular interest, for it seems possible that the numerous traces left by the glaciers allow a correlation to be made between the deposits of the Durance basin and those of the Isère. A more or less satisfactory correlation has, infact, been established for the Würm. One of the consequences of this work has been the discovery in the Drac valley of pre-würmian deposits.