Charavines41an

To clear the ground for sowing, the Neolithic people used mattocks made of antlers 15 to 20 cm long. This instrument, which was solid but not powerful enough to be very efficient, did not produce results as good as those obtained by ploughing with a swing plough.

The villages are abandoned after 20 or22 years. This cyclical habitat system, which is well-known in both the Jura region and western Switzerland, can be explained by horticultural type farming, revealed by the study of the grains, carried out after the burning of the plant cover on heavy, argillaceous earth. The land is still relatively unfertile today, despite modern methods of cultivation.

Cereal were sowed in furrows with numerous hoeing during the growth.

In the Neolithic period, the soil was quickly depleted after being cultivated in furrows by short mattocks made of antlers.... When the surrounding extension of the cultivated part of the territory no longer provided yielded enough to feed the community, it was necessary to leave and rebuild the village a few kilometers away, in the middle of virgin land or land that had been regenerated by vegetation after having been previously abandoned.

Therefore, foreseeing the time of insufficient crops, some members of the group would go out and build another village and all the families would move there two to four years later. This testifies to a well-developed social and territorial organization.

This is a process that has already been identified during the colonization of the slopes of the Vercors region near Grenoble. In the Vercors, there are three archeological periods that correspond to three deforestation operations, with the presence of cereals, separated by three reforestation phases.