The end of the Neolithic in Western Switzerland: peopling dynamics through nonmetric dental study

Entity at the end of the European Neolithic, the Bell Beaker phenomenon, although difficult to define and explain as a whole, has benefited from diverse and varied interpretations. Such difficulties are due to its broad geographic distribution and complex cultural components. For several years now, research in the Laboratory of Prehistoric Archaeology and Peopling History at the University of Geneva has focused on research at the scale of this phenomenon. Through four complementary axes of research (typology and chronology of common ware pottery, territorial occupation, copper metallurgy and dental anthropology), the objective is to identify the modes of transition governing the transition from the Final Neolithic to the Bell Beaker. Emphasis is placed in this contribution not only on one of the research axes - dental anthropology -, but also on a region in which the expression of the Bell Beaker is all the more interesting for the varieties of its components: Western Switzerland. The objective was to determine, by the analysis of nonmetric dental traits, whether the emergence of the Bell Beaker coincided or not with population renewal. Finally, the results provided by dental morphology are discussed and compared with other components, primarily cultural, in order to propose a scenario for settlement in Swiss territory at the end of the Neolithic