Solène Chevallier

Education

• Master's degree: Archaeology and sciences for archaeology: Bio-archaeology and naturalistic approaches to anthropized sequences, Aix Marseille Université, 2022
• Bachelor's degree: Archaeology and History of art, Aix Marseille Université, 2020

PhD Project

Prehistoric societies in the mirror of mobility: the case of the Late Bronze Age in north-eastern France based on Strontium isotopic analyses

Between 2200 and 800 BC, the European Bronze Age is a major historical moment, at the interface of agropastoral and proto-urban societies. Culturally, at that time, northern France is split in two at Ile-de-France along a north-south axis, with Atlantic-Channel-North Sea influences in the west and Middle Rhine influences in the east. Those influences are expressed through material culture and funerary practices. By the end of the Middle Bronze Age (c. 1300 BC), the boundary between the two cultural affinities shifts with a progression of eastern influences to the west (Peake et al., 2017).

Issues related to the movement of populations and intercommunity exchange become crucial to understand the structures of the societies studied. This thesis focuses on the study of the mobility of people, men, women, and children, based on corpus dated from the end of the Middle Bronze Age to the initial stage of the Final Bronze Age (1400-1100 B.C.) and on a geographical area corresponding to north-eastern France. For the first time in France, on this period, a new approach is being implemented, that of studying mobility based on cremated archaeo-osteological material. The aim is to characterize the mobility of individuals from different archaeological contexts by identifying local and non-local subjects through the analysis of strontium ratios. The finality of this doctoral research is thus to apprehend the question of mobility and contacts between human groups, all essential elements that will allow a better understanding of the structuring and the social and economic organization of Bronze Age societies in France.

Keywords 

Bioarchaeology, Isotopic analyses (Sr), Cremation, Mobility, Bronze Age

PhD Supervisors (Joint PhD Aix Marseille University - INRAP & VUB AMGC)

Dr. Estelle Herrscher (HDR, DR CNRS)

Prof. Christophe Snoeck (VUB)