Description

The sites of Teviec and Hoedic, located in Brittany and excavated from 1928 to 1934 by Marthe and Saint-Just Pequart, have yielded twenty-odd graves dating to the end of the Mesolithic and containing almost forty individuals. Nearly a century later, they remain the most important funerary groups ever discovered in France for this period, and two major French Mesolithic sites. Until these days though, despite previous re-examinations of part of the unearthed material, no general review of the field data or of the human remains had ever been carried out, and all the debates concerning the functioning of both cemeteries relied on the interpretations once made by the Pequart and on the anthropological studies by Marcellin Boule and Henri Victor Vallois. This book presents the long lacking bioarchaeological review study of the Teviec and Hoedic graves: the field data have been reconsidered, relying in particular on a large series of pictures taken by the excavators, and the number of dead individuals, their age and sex have been reevaluated using anthropological techniques in accordance with our current knowledge. This review also gives us the occasion to carry out a global reflection on the circumstances under which the dead were grouped during the Mesolithic period and on the society of Atlantic Europe's last hunters-gatherers as perceived through the filter of their funerary practices.