Présentation

Created in 2007 in the framework of the French CNRS, the GDRE PREHISTOS is currently composed of 44 members from 9 western, central and eastern European countries (France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Russia) and is affiliated with 16 partnership laboratories from 21 different institutions.

The shared goal of the members of the GDRE PREHISTOS is to trace the potentially linked history of two main innovations associated with bone material working (Axis 1 – “debitage by extraction” and Axis 2 – the use of bevels in hafting systems) and to evaluate their social role through their variability and evolution over a broad geographic (Europe) and chronological scale (Paleolithic to the Iron Age) (General Topic).

At the same time, the GDRE PREHISTOS aims to follow the orientation of studies of prehistoric bone industries developed in the late 1990’s and early 2000’S (technological and functional usewear studies), to further develop this domain across Europe, to make existing scientific collaborations between European scientists and laboratories official, and to establish new collaborations, especially with laboratories in emerging countries.

Its mission is to support and coordinate scientific activities addressing its research topic, to facilitate and encourage contacts and exchanges between researchers, to enable collaborations, to coordinate and structure multi-partner research programs, to harmonize colloquium programs that address its research topic and ensure their complementarity, and to encourage educational actions.

The first four-year program of the GDRE PREHISTOS enabled us to construct its scientific bases in the form of tools (such as the multilingual lexicon and the data sheets), as well as the resources (research, identification, case studies, experimentation) necessary to attain its scientific goals. It also resulted in publications. The second four-year program (2011-2014) will allow us to develop our research programs and to officially integrate Romanian, Bulgarian and Polish collaborators.