Tirelessly and methodically, a small group of archaeologists from the Institut National de Recherches Archéologiques Préventives (INRAP) and the Val-de-Marne department's archaeology service worked to rescue the settlement of our distant Middle Neolithic ancestors, 6,000 years ago, from oblivion and into the light. Time was of the essence. The day was September 27, and they had only two days before they would have to pack up and hand over the site to Ivry Confluences, one of the largest urban development projects in Paris' inner suburbs (145 hectares), near the junction of the Seine and the Marne rivers on the territory of Ivry-sur-Seine (Paris region), which has been underway for over ten years. These archaeological excavations are being carried out on the orders of the French state.
What makes this latest campaign exceptional is the richness, density and quality of its finds. In recent years, 11 campaigns have been organized on several plots of land, three of them on the former site of the BHV department stores' warehouses, closed in 2012: In 2014, 2017, and this year from April to September.
According to INRAP archaeologist Fabrice Marti in charge of the dig, 2023 is shaping up to be a vintage year. "We came across portions of Middle Megalithic 1 walls, more specifically from the Cerny culture. A diagnosis usually enables us to more or less know what to expect, but this has been a very big surprise. We're inside a village. It's a first for this period. There's no equivalent." The Cerny, named after a town in Essonne (south of Paris), spread across much of northern France and especially the Paris basin from the second half of the fifth millennium B.C. It was characterized by the construction of walls, the rearing of cattle, and the production of ceramics with round pots adorned with geometric motifs hallmarked in bands. It also marked the beginning of megalithism in France.
The first Ivry residents settled here around 4,200 BC. They built a wall, the full length of which has not been found, but it is estimated that several thousand large trees (around 30 centimeters in diameter) had to be felled to erect it. Because the site was a wet meadow, the trees had to be brought in from another location – a monumental task.
Around 5,500 artifacts have been discovered, including shards of Cerny ceramics, flint, arrowheads, broken stone axes and two small pieces of jewelry made from elongated shells from the Atlantic Ocean... On the flip side, very few skeletal remains have been found. They were probably used to make glue or various objects, such as needles. This would imply that the meat they ate mainly came from livestock, with the overwhelming majority being beef and the remainder divided between mutton, goat and pork. As for game, which very much provided a minority of their meat supplies, it consisted of deer and wild boar.
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