THE MESOLITHIC SITE OF LES FIEUX (MIERS, LOT): a hunting camp on the Gramat karst plateau ? Nicolas VALDEYRON, Thomas BRIAND, Laurent BOUBY, Auréade HENRY, Rym KHEDHAIER, Benjamin MARQUEBIELLE, Hélène MARTIN, Anna THIBEAU, Bruno BOSC-ZANARDO Abstract The Mesolithic site located in the western entrance of the cave of Les Fieux (Miers, Lot), excavated in the 1970’s by F. Champagne, has often been interpreted as a hunting camp. This hypothesis is mostly based on features of the lithic industry, which is largely dominated by weapon elements. The results of a multidisciplinary study of the Mesolithic assemblages now provide an opportunity to question the validity of this hypothesis. While the data collected (in the ields of anthracology, zooarchaeology, carpology, lithic technology and usewear, bone technology, sedimentology, etc.), do not completely invalidate it, they do suggest a few nuances. The activities identiied are more varied than would be expected for a simple hunting camp, as are the animal carcass exploitation strategies, indicating an in situ consumption of animal products and thus a functional complexity that is not fully compatible with this interpretation. Keywords Early Mesolithic, Sauveterrian, rock shelter, site function, activities, lithic industry, bone industry, usewear, zooarchaeology, paleoenvironment. 1 - Introduction The Mesolithic site located in the western entrance of the cave of Les Fieux (Miers, Lot) was discovered in 1966 when modiications were being made to the entrance of the decorated part of the cavity discovered two years earlier. F. Champagne then explored the site from 1967 to 1973. It yielded a sequence of Mesolithic occupations distributed throughout three successive levels (from the earliest to the latest, D1, D2 and D3). These occupations were attributed to an early phase of the Sauveterrian (ten C14 dates between 8500 and 8000 cal. BC), currently known through only a few notes (Champagne and Espitalié, 1972; Champagne and Jaubert, 1981; Champagne et al., 1990) and university theses (Valdeyron, 1994; Marcus, 2000; Briand, 2004). In the context of the preparation of a monographic publication, we conducted multidisciplinary studies of the site itself and the different assemblages collected by F. Champagne. This goal of this paper is to present a synthesis of the results of these studies and their confrontation with each other, focusing on the interpreta- tion of the site function that can be reached based on the data now available. While the initial hypothesis of a “hunting camp” cannot be totally rejected, some of the data indicate a more varied range of activities than would be expected and thus a site function that is more complex than that of a site occupied only during specialized movements associated solely with hunting. http://www.palethnologie.org P@lethnologie | 2011 | p. 000-000