Home Issues 27 The Solutrean bone industry from Recently discovered Solutrean sites have provided little data about bone working.
Solutrean bone industry is mainly known through old archaeological collections from the first half of the 20 th century or out of context and very incomplete. The resumption of old excavations, such as in Rochefort cave, far from bringing redundant information, opens up new research perspectives.
The identification of these "unshaped tools" is the consequence of methodological changes and first of all of the increase of use-wear studies and of a more systematic use of the experimental approach. Thus, in Rochefort cave, implements devoted to lithic knapping are completing the Solutrean toolkit while about fifty waste from reindeer antler working confirm blank production by splitting.
These artefacts help to understand the specificity of Solutrean bone technology. They enlighten the activities carried out on the site and the peculiarities of a northern Solutrean still insufficiently documented. In the present state of research, they also illustrate the interest to excavate again old sites that may still have a strong informative potential.
In this context, it has two major interests. Today, the data available on Solutrean bone industry come mostly from excavations carried out between the end of the 19 th and the beginning of the 20 th century, that is to say from collections obtained by selective collecting, often decontextualized and generally altered both physically and in their composition Baumann The Rochefort corpus thus escapes these traditional biases and constitutes a homogeneous and significant working basis.
