Middle Solutrean engraved bone artefacts from Rochefort Cave (Saint-Pierre-sur-Erve, Mayenne, France)

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