Gravures et abstraction: Les gravures non figuratives de Roc-la-Tour I, le schiste gravé des Beaux-Sarts et les progrès de l’abstraction durant la Préhistoire et l’Histoire

RésuméLes 491 plaquettes gravées magdaléniennes de Roc-la-Tour I comportent, outre les 75 figurations animales et humaines, 410 signes abstraits de 14 types variés, dont huit (avec plus de 130 cas) sont inconnus dans le Magdalénien du Sud-Ouest de la France. Il y a en outre 213 groupes de traits parallèles. La plaquette de schiste des Beaux-Sarts, nettement postérieure au Paléolithique, comporte 94 traits parallèles répartis en quatre séries. Ce ne sont pas des comptes. L’auteur analyse les capacités mentales attestées par ces témoins et les différencie des importants progrès intervenus par la suite dans les possibilités d’abstraction du cerveau humain.

Beyond the 75 animal and human pictures, the 491 Magdalenian engraved plaquettes bear 410 abstract signs, in 14 different types, among which eight were unknown up to now in South-Western France, (more than 130 cases). Some examples of all those signs are shown. Besides there are 213 groups of parallel lines. At “Les Beaux-Sarts”, less than 2 m from the hut described in 2003, another human excavation (maybe a tomb?) delivered a schist plaquette with 94 parallel lines carved on its surface, the lines appear as three groups of 14, 7 (or 8?) and 24 (or 28?) lines and one group of 17 (or 18?) oblique lines, with various secondary lines. Five thousand years before the cerebral center of precise calculation was at the beginning of its formation, this piece, out of the bases of which calculation might be subdivided, cannot be considered as the evidence that they were able to count. The author analyses the affective mental possibilities proved by those elements and puts them apart from the rational progress in the abstraction possibilities of the human brain, which occurred later all through ten thousand years.