statue-menhir de Saint-Julien
DatedEst. 4800–2500 BCE
Photo Liberliger · CC BY-SA 4.0Source file on Wikimedia Commons
Overview
About this site
Overview
The statue-menhir de Saint-Julien is a statue-menhir of the Rouergue group, found at Belmont-sur-Rance in the département of Aveyron, France. It is a small female figure in Permian sandstone, dated by typological estimate to 4800 BCE to 2500 BCE.
The original has been lost; its features are known from two photographs and a description by the abbé Frédéric Hermet.
Read on Wikipedia2 min readCC BY-SA 4.0
Where it sits in time
The site's dated range, placed against world reference points.
The scale is logarithmic: each step to the left is about ten times older than the last.
Article
statue-menhir de Saint-Julien
The statue was found before 1900 on the banks of a stream, in a heap of demolition stones.
DescriptionSources for this section
Sources for this section
The statue was found before 1900 on the banks of a stream, in a heap of demolition stones. It was sculpted on a slab of Permian sandstone of local origin measuring 0.80 m in height and 0.60 m in width.
It is a small female statue-menhir whose lower part, below the feet, may have been broken off. The face (eyes, nose, tattoos) and the upper and lower limbs are complete. The breasts are oddly placed below the hands, and the legs are very short beneath the belt. On the back the shoulder-blade hooks and the plaited hairstyle are visible. The figure wears a necklace of four rows, a Y-shaped pendant and a belt decorated with chevrons and vertical bands.
ConservationSources for this section
Sources for this section
The original is lost. A copy of the statue has been erected north of the village of the commune, near the aerodrome.
Tradition and region
About this kind of monument
Statue menhirs of France
A statue menhir is a carved standing stone of the later European Neolithic, in which a vertical slab or pillar has a stylised human figure cut into it, sometimes with hints of clothing or weapons. They are most commonly found in southern and western France, Catalonia, Corsica, Sardinia, Italy and the Alps, and France has most of the Atlas's records. A group from the Iron Age is also known in Liguria and Lunigiana in Italy, and there are two on Guernsey. One of them, La Gran'mère du Chimquière, "the grandmother of the cemetery", stands in a churchyard.
A well-known site is on Corsica. Filitosa, in the south of the island, is a megalithic site occupied from the end of the Neolithic and the beginning of the Bronze Age until about Roman times. Arrowheads and pottery date the earliest habitation to 3300 BCE. Around 1500 BCE menhirs 2 to 3 metres high were erected there, carved with human faces, armour and weapons. About twenty menhirs of various periods have been counted. One interpretation, by Roger Grosjean, was that they were set up to ward off an invasion by a people he called the Torréens, who threw them down, broke them up and reused some as building stone, and then built the circular stone structures called torri; later researchers disputed this theory.
Dating rests on comparison with the Arco stelae, six Copper Age statue menhirs found in Trentino in 1989, which are similar in style to other anthropomorphic stelae of the fourth and third millennia BCE.
When visiting, look at the weapons and belt carved on the stone.
Paraphrased from Wikipedia: Statue menhir, Wikipedia: Filitosa, Wikipedia: Arco stelae · CC BY-SA 4.0
From the article
Dated moments in the story
- 1900
Elle fut découverte avant 1900 sur les bords d'un ruisseau dans un tas de pierres de démolition.
Source - 2005
460-461 Jean-Pierre Serres, Les statues-menhirs du sud-Aveyron, Millau, Éditions du Beffroi, 2005, 48 p.
Source - 2010
Jean Guilaine), Hommes et femmes de pierre - Statues-menhirs du Rouergue et du Haut-Languedoc, Toulouse, Archives d'Écologie Préhistorique, 2010, 538 p.
Source
Photographs
1 photograph, each with its author and licence
Lore
Evidence & Lore
What the sources actually support — and, kept apart, what has been claimed.
What the evidence supports
Dates
Est. 4800–2500 BCEHow this date was established: Type comparisonTypical range for statue-menhirs in France; this site has not been dated itself. Statue menhirs were created during the later European Neolithic Period and the megalithic constructions of Brittany begin c. 4800 BC.Source for this date
Where it stands
France
The pin marks the monument itself — its exact point.
- Coordinates
- 43°49′30″ N, 2°44′58″ EFor a GPS or map app: 43.82506, 2.74934
Access is as our sources describe it; we have not visited the site to check.
Nearby
The closest sites in the Atlas, by straight line.
statue-menhir de Belmont4800–2500 BCE- Statue-menhir de Belmont-sur-Rance4800–2500 BCE
statue-menhir de Serres4800–2500 BCE- statue-menhir de Serres4800–2500 BCE
- Statue-menhirstatue-menhir de Nougras4800–2500 BCE
statue-menhir de Lucante4800–2500 BCE- statue-menhir de Lucante4800–2500 BCE
statue-menhir du Plo de Mas-Viel4800–2500 BCE
Sources
Every record behind this page, with the link it came from.
2 sources behind this page
- 01Wikidata Q111973507wikidata.org
- 02Source for this dateen.wikipedia.org
Image files
- Belmont st-julien 02.jpgLiberligerCC BY-SA 4.0
Report a correctionWrong date, name, photograph or source? Tell us and it will be put right.
Around this place
The ten nearest sites, by compass
- statue-menhir de Belmont<0.1 km N
- Statue-menhir de Belmont-sur-Rance<0.1 km NW
- statue-menhir de Serres3.7 km W
- statue-menhir de Serres3.7 km W
- statue-menhir de Nougras3.8 km E
- statue-menhir de Lucante4.3 km W
- statue-menhir de Lucante4.3 km W
- statue-menhir du Plo de Mas-Viel5.9 km E
- statue-menhir de Saint-Léonce7.1 km NW
- statue-menhir de Serregrand8.1 km N
Credit
Text, licence and sources
Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Statue-menhir de Saint-Julien" (French), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0; authors are listed in the page history. Reused under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read on Wikipedia · Edit history and authors