New excavation of the Mousterian site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints: Zooarchaeological implications

The “Bouffia Bonneval” at la Chapelle-aux-Saints (France) is well known for having delivered in the early XX century a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton which was interpreted as the first Mousterian sepulture ever discovered. However, the “Bouffia Bonneval” is only one of the many small dismantled cavities that constitute the site. La Chapelle-aux-Saints has been the subject of a new recovery for the past 10 years. The majority of the cavities have delivered archaeological deposits attributed mostly to the Late Middle Paleolithic and linked to human and carnivore activities.

One of them, the “Bouffia 118”, still under excavation, has delivered a stratigraphy possibly contemporaneous from the one of the main cavity, constituted of the succession of two archaeological levels, one dominated by reindeer remains, the other by bison. By focusing on the zooarchaeological results, we will show how the new discoveries provide valuable information for understanding the history of the site.

The zooarchaeological data of this latest excavation give a new view of the Neanderthal skeleton and new hypotheses are proposed to understanding the function and the formation process of the “Bouffia Bonneval”, one of the most famous of French prehistory.