199 P. Desrosiers (ed.), The Emergence of Pressure Blade Making: From Origin to Modern Experimentation, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-2003-3_7, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 7.1 Introduction Following the research of Jacques Tixier and Marie-Louise Inizan (Tixier 1976, 1978; Inizan 1991), some scholars have suggested looking at pressure-knapping blade production as an original cultural marker from its first appearance, not only as a simple technique, but also as the component of a set of transferable methods. In south-eastern France, in the beginning of the 1980s, the hypothesis was pro- posed that Castelnovian hunters had practised pressure-knapping technique (i.e. Châteauneuf-lès-Martigues – La Font des Pigeons), and that this indicated a rupture between Mesolithic technical tradition and the Cardial that was considered at that time as the first Neolithic culture of the western Mediterranean (Binder 1987, 2000). These observations were in contrast with the pattern proposed by M. Escalon de Fonton. He considered tool kits from both sets as similar and even identical, and developed a theory of the formation in the western Mediterranean of an original Neolithic techno-complex, independent from the near-eastern core of neolithization (Escalon 1956). D. Binder (*) • C. Collina • R. Guilbert Université Nice Sophia-Antipolis, CNRS, UMR 6130, CEPAM, Nice, France e-mail: didier.binder@cepam.cnrs.fr T. Perrin Université Le Mirail, Toulouse, France O. Garcia-Puchol Prehistory Department, Universitat de València, València, Spain Chapter 7 Pressure-Knapping Blade Production in the North-Western Mediterranean Region During the Seventh Millennium cal B.C. Didier Binder, Carmine Collina, Raphaëlle Guilbert, Thomas Perrin, and Oreto Garcia-Puchol