A hardly known, early gunflint industry near Veaux-Malaucène (Dépt. Vaucluse, Provence, France) and its incorporation into international research

Abstract

In fall 2004 the author visited the region of Veaux-Malaucène, Dépt. Vaucluse, France, for the second time since 1999. This time he was searching for remains of an indigenous gunflint industry that used outcrops of regional Cretaceous flint around the foothills of Mont Ventoux, the Crête du Rissas. At the time, pertaining information was as good as completely missing, with the exception of the final, and short, chapter in a report from the middle of the 20th century on the excavation of a local cave. Based on that scarce information the author surveyed the area for some hours and stumbled upon dozens of workshops from gunflint knappers (caillouteurs). These are limited concentrations of flint waste, mainly flakes of all sizes from quartering/knapping flint nodules. Interestingly enough, classical waste cores from blade production were totally absent, indicating that the local gunflints were not made from sectioned flint blades. What caught the author’s eye instead, were a great number of different sized flakes, the ventral faces of which showed one or more stumpy negatives from the extraction of small flakes of fingernail shape. Obviously, these were the sought after waste cores. Consequently the short, stumpy flakes with wedge-shaped longitudinal cross-section must be understood as the intended semi-finished product, to be worked into wedges. While only one of these fingernail-shaped flakes, by the way discarded, was found, the author collected 95 waste cores for later analysis. This article presents the results of that analysis. As far as the beginning of the gunflint production is concerned, at the moment one can only state that the industry may have started already in the middle of the 17th century. Concerning the end, it seems that there is evidence indicating that gunflint production lasted until 1870, but it is unknown whether wedges or, at that time, blade based gunflints have been produced. Desirable further research should focus on archives, arsenals and collections of contemporary fire-weapons. The main aim should be the assignment of known wedges, e. g. from arsenals, to the gunflint workshops of Vaucluse. In this regard, geochemical analyses of the local flint would certainly play an essential role.