Following people by following rocks: intra-island exchanges and mobility in pre- and protohistoric Corsica

Abstract

International audienceDuring pre- and protohistory, the first inhabitants of Corsica imported many lithic materials to make their tools, in particular obsidian and flint from Sardinia, two materials of good quality but absent from the Corsican landscape. These exogenous rocks have been at the heart of most of the typotechnological and provenance studies carried out on the lithic series unearthed in Corsica, highlighting the existence of long-distance diffusion networks. Endogenous rocks have also been used, notably rhyolite, a fine-grained siliceous volcanic rock widely distributed in Corsica, but they have received much less attention, notably due to a lack of methodological tools. Indeed, provenance studies of flint and obsidian have been carried out for several decades in many places in the world and multiple methodological developments have already been realized, which has not been the case for rhyolites. However, this material seems to have circulated at different levels within the island, from local to regional, and is thus potentially a carrier of information on mobility, exchange networks or territoriality, inaccessible from the study of exogenous materials.After setting up an effective and non-destructive analytical protocol to determine the origin of Corsican rhyolites, mostly based on EDXRF method, we analysed several archaeological series, from the Early Neolithic to the Middle Bronze Age. Our results are still preliminary, and we will require analysis of other sites to obtain a more detailed view. However, these studies already allow us to get a first glimpse of unsuspected intra-island diffusion networks, to shed light on the relationships between coastal and mountain sites and to inform us of the ways in which these peoples used their environment