Within the Solutrean portable corpus gathered from Rochefort cave, a series of twenty-five items was isolated. It is mainly made up of herbivore ribs but also of fragments of long bones and ivory that are showing different types of incisions.
Their lay out does not indicate simple grooves related to butchering activities. Remarkable items such as an entire brown bear rib or a fragment of mammoth tusk are part of this series of incised pieces. These symbolic engraved decorations are known for the Solutrean period but the imprecise chronostratigraphic contexts of most of the older collections make them unreliable items of reference.
As the search for comparisons has not really been fruitful, the Rochefort cave corpus singles out by the quantity and quality of the objects that have been inventoried. The cave, visited since Palaeolithic times, has long been known: it is presently one of two caves in the valley open for guided tours. It is one of the largest caves of the group with a total length of m, divided into an upper and a lower karst.
The upper level was the only one accessible in prehistoric times: it is made of a 24 m long access corridor that opens up into a large chamber.
In spite of several excavations at the end of the 19 th century and in the s that identified a Palaeolithic presence in the cave, the surfaces available for modern archaeological research remain significant. Since , a multi-year excavation has been carried out in part of the large chamber which led to the identification of a remarkable Solutrean level fig. Indeed the Solutrean layer of Rochefort cave, with its lithic and faunal assemblages and the presence of art on plaquettes and bone has all the characteristics of a real habitation site Hinguant and Colleter dir.
