Enter the Matrix

Late Bronze Age Casting Moulds from »La Motte« (Agde, Dép. Hérault/F) in their Context

Abstract

Enter the Matrix. Late Bronze Age Casting Moulds from »La Motte« (Agde, Dép. Hérault/F) in their Context

The La Motte 1 site, currently submerged under the River Hérault in Agde, is known in particular for the discovery of a spectacular deposit of ornamental objects associated with a settlement. Since then, other underwater excavation campaigns have brought to light more precise details on the chronology, size and economy of the site, occupied at the end of the Bronze Age and at the very beginning of the Iron Age. Among the evidence of artisanal activities, four fragments of casting moulds provide new information on metal production at the end of the Bronze Age in Mediterranean France, in particular on the organisation thereof and the diffusion of bronze models. While one of these moulds was used to manufacture tools that are well attested regionally and at the site itself – socketed axes of the Frouard type without a loop –, others were used to create objects that are rarer or even unknown in the region. Some of these have even previously been considered exotic. This is the case for a mould for spearheads of the Vénat type, which can be found mainly on the French Atlantic coast, and another used to produce pins with a large conical head, especially widespread in the northern Adriatic. Given the archaeological and ethnographic data, the hypothesis that should prevail here is that of on-site metallurgists carrying out their craft within the settlement. The discovery of multiple metallurgy moulds at the same site is rare in Mediterranean France and suggests a pivotal role of this settlement in the production and distribution of objects and semi-finished products made from copper alloys, which could have been made at least in part from the ore from the Cabrières district. The shapes of the objects produced indicate that the site was integrated into networks that extended well beyond the regional framework, sometimes over very long distances. This prefigures the prominent role that the region around Agde would play in the exchanges connecting the Mediterranean to the Celtic world in the Early Iron Age.