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Grotte des Cottés

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Site type:
Cave
Site function:
Habitation site
Lat/Long:
46.69, 0.84
Country:
France
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The Grotte des Cottés or Grotte des Cottets is located in Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, in the French department of Vienne, in Poitou-Charentes, region of Nouvelle-Aquitaine.

It has the particularity of presenting a continuous archaeological sequence from the end of the Middle Paleolithic to the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, thus including the Mousterian, the Châtelperronian and the first phases of the Aurignacian. Louis Pradel established it as the eponymous deposit of the evolved Châtelperronien, on the basis of the "Pointe des Coteurs", a slender Châtelperron point. If this evolved Châtelperronian is indeed a final phase of the Châtelperronian, it could be one of the rare testimonies of the behavior of the very last Neanderthals of the western coast of Europe.

In 1880, R. de La Rochebrune excavated the cave; there are two levels of occupation: Mousterian and Aurignacian. Father Henri Breuil gives an account of these excavations in 1906.

Louis Pradel excavated it from 1951, and F. Lévêque between 1972 and 1984.

In 2006, Marie Soressi undertook new excavations.