Terra Amata

Terra Amata is an archaeological site on the slopes of Mount Boron in Nice, France, about 26 m (85 ft) above present sea level on what was once a beach. It was found during building work in 1966 and became famous as a candidate for the oldest known built shelters. The site now lies beneath an apartment block that houses the Musée de Préhistoire Terra Amata.

Excavation

Henry de Lumley was given permission to excavate from 28 January to 5 July 1966. His team worked seven days a week and, by the end, around the clock to record the deposits before construction resumed.

The hut interpretation

De Lumley described a series of huts on the beach, each with a hearth in the middle. Low walls of stones and pebbles on the northwest side of the hearths were read as windbreaks against the Mistral. He proposed that the huts were made of animal skins stretched over poles, with a hole for smoke, and that one shelter could hold twenty to forty people. The Smithsonian Human Origins Program describes post holes and evidence of several shelters, some up to 14.9 m (49 ft) long, and dates the site to about 400,000 years ago. De Lumley dated the dwellings to about 380,000 years ago.

The critique

Archaeologist Paola Villa studied the site for her doctoral research and published Terra Amata and the Middle Pleistocene archaeological record of southern France in 1983. Her main points were:

• the stone "arrangements" could have formed naturally, through stream flow, soil creep or similar processes;
• stone artefacts from supposedly separate living floors fit back together, showing that objects had moved up and down through the sediment;
• the layers were therefore mixed, so neither the floors nor the dates could be treated as single episodes.

Villa suggested a younger age, around 230,000 years ago. Other archaeologists, including Roebroeks and van Kolfschoten in 1994, have also treated natural deposition as at least as plausible as deliberate building.

Significance for roofing history

Terra Amata is often reproduced in textbooks as an image of early hide-covered huts. For roofing history its value lies as much in the debate as in the reconstruction: it shows how little can be proven about perishable roofs, and how easily natural patterns can be read as architecture. The nearby Lazaret cave raises similar questions for a later period.