The site of Ormesson – Les Bossats around 27.000 BP: contribution of the lithic industry to the understanding of site function and occupation of the Paris Basin during the Early Gravettian

Following the discovery of Gravettian stone tools and faunal remains in a field near the village of Ormesson, the open-air multi-stratified site of Les Bossats has been excavated since 2009. Beyond extending the already long list of Gravettian sites in the Loing Valley, its discovery is exceptional thanks to the preservation of the occupation layer within a loess deposit and the diversity of the remains that is remarkable for an open-air site.
Dated to the beginning of Heinrich event 3, the Gravettian occupation of Les Bossats has yielded a high number of lithic artefacts, totalling approximately 16.000 at the moment. The lithic technical system uses primarily the local Campanian flint, but also Tertiary flint from further away was brought to the site in the form of blanks and small cores. Straight regular blades were produced on elongated cores with a soft stone hammer through a bidirectional and symmetric reduction sequence. Several strategies were used for producing bladelets. Some of them were integrated in blade production, while others were independent of it. Burins and backed pieces are clearly overrepresented in the assemblage, whereas other types of retouched tools are rare. Microgravette points dominate among the backed pieces. Preliminary observations of impact damage confirm that at least some of these elements likely served as armatures for hunting, thus supporting the hypothesis of an occupation that was mostly dedicated to this activity.
After nearly 10 years of excavation, the Gravettian occupation of Les Bossats has become a new reference site for the early phase of the Gravettian. The integration of varied data from other sites across the Paris Basin allows evaluating the potential of this region for future palaeoethnological and palaeohistorical research on the Gravettian, following the famous example of the Final Magdalenian from the same region.