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Visiting the Rock of Solutré (Roche de Solutré)

You can thank an overactive 19th-century imagination, really, for the fame of the Rock of Solutré, just outside the Burgundy wine town on Macon. There’s a dramatic engraving, after a sketch by Adrien Arcillen, one of the early excavators to work on the height, showing horses, chased by human hunters, tumbling dramatically off a sheer cliff.

It’s a scene still being recreated, in words at least, by the more excitable end of the guide book market: in fact, the Saone and Loire Museum of Prehistory at the site explains, what did happen, over tens of thousands of years, was that horses (very like the surviving Przewalski horse), migrated from the flooded and marshy river flats of what is now the Saone into the summer grazing of the Macon hills, had to pass through a narrow pinch point here, a perfect trapping point where hunters were able to kill so many that they could take only the choicest morsels of the meat, leaving the rest.

By contrast in winter, when they caught a far smaller number of reindeer the same way, marks on the bones show they utilised every scrap of meat they could – at a time when probably it could be stored. Although this wasn’t entirely mindless slaughter: archaeologists have found that most of the bones belonged to adult horses: the young were presumably allowed to pass to grow up for later years.

So it still makes for an amazing archaeological site. (In some places the bones formed a virtual mat, built up over millennia – and long exploited for the phosphorous they contained, while tradition had it that they were left over from the combat of knights trying to take the castle that was erected on the rock in medieval times).

(A horse vertebrae in the process of butchery.)

And there’s a dramatic and inspiring view from the top of the rock (although only scant traces of the castle) to reward the steady half-hour climb (although it is of the gorgeous Macon wine villages – not perhaps a place to catch a prehistoric vibe). And it gives a very good sense of the flood plain that the horses had to flee.

The museum is new, and has mercifully been cut into the hillside, so it doesn’t intrude on the scenery or the history. Outside the designers have been allowed more of a free rein, although with more sense of place and mood than is often the case, with an archaeological and botanic garden.

There’s a lot to say, for this site was in use for the four major stages of the Upper Paleolithic the Aurnacian, the Gravettian, the Solutrean and the Magdalenian. There’s a highly effective graphic that explains the importance of the development of technology through these periods. In the lower and middle Paleolithic humans hunted mainly with stabbing spears, which meant they had to get within about 3m of their prey. In the middle Paleolithic came the thrown lance, which meant you could be up to 15m away, then the spearthrower, around 18,000BC – up to 30m away, and then in the Epipaleolithic about 9,000BC came the bow, which flew up to 50m to kill a beast – and left the hunter an awful lot safer.

Solutre’s importance can be seen from the fact that it gives its name to the third of those, which ran from 20,000 to 16,000 years ago, marked by its stone-working culture of producing laurel-leaf points. Archaeologists have reproduced these, by backwards engineering, but what they haven’t really managed to do is explain why they were made. The smaller ones were probably spear and lance points, but no one has really explained the larger ones.

Consequently, detailed information on stone working is a strong point of this museum, which may not to be everyone’s taste, but most people will be captivated by the small models of the hunt, which do a good job of catching the sense of the drama of the moment.

(Beware the English audio guide though – if you can possibly read some French, go for that option instead, or else just look at the pictures – and you only really need to do that to understand flint knapping techniques. The guide is of stultifying, spectacular dullness – like having a first year university textbook read to you, very s.l.o.w.l.y…..)

You also won’t need a guide to understand the map showing the strong concentration of prehistoric sites along this part of the Saone, from a Homo erectus rock shelter at Aze, to the very prolithic Epipaleolithic site at Varennes-le-Macon, just down the road, from a temporary camp used by hunters and fishers. Clearly it was a rich environment, although for most of this time a lot colder than today – explaining the occasional appearance of mammoth!

But it wasn’t all work for the Solutreans. They also boasted a rich, subtle artistic sense, in particular in carvings in low relief, several of which are shown in the museum and rock art. They also were obviously regularly counted something – many lengths with multiple scratches on them have been found – but the reasons can only be guessed at.

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Practical information – you’ll need a car, or bicycle, to get to the museum, or be very patient with buses.

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