Monumental cemeteries of the 5th millennium BC: The Fleury-sur-Orne contribution

The monumental Neolithic cemetery of Fleury-sur-Orne (Normandy, France), covering more than 35 hectares, was the focus of excavations in 2014. While other similar cemeteries have been inventoried in the same region, the excavation of Fleury makes it the only Norman reference site of a major phenomenon in the northern half of France during the 5th millennium BC. The cemetery has thus far yielded 32 monuments of Passy type (STP), comparable to long barrows, of which one mound is preserved. Seventeen individual burials are preserved inside these monuments. These new data allow significant advances in knowledge of the architecture, graves, selection criteria of the dead for burial, status of the dead and more generally the funerary operation of the cemetery. In addition, the challenge of this new information is to investigate the link between Normandy and the Paris Basin, two discontinuous regions for the distribution of cemeteries of Passy type. This comparison supports the unity of the phenomenon. Dates belong to the same chronological period and the two groups share the same cultural attributes. The structure of the Fleury cemetery is also similar to that observed at Passy and Balloy. Finally, the graves, the dead and some burial goods confirm the existence of shared symbolic references. However, at Fleury, several aspects of the burial system and deposition pattern for the dead differ from that of burials in the Paris Basin. While the phenomenon is the same between the two geographic groups, their expressions differ. Diachronically, although funerary monumentalism gradually disappears in the Paris Basin with the disappearances of Passy type burials, to the west the phenomenon persists and the Fleury cemetery confirms the succession of such monuments and the first passage graves.