The Bell Beaker Culture in the Canton of Fribourg (Switzerland): Current State of Research

Since 1980, the Canton of Fribourg in Switzerland has been subject to several preventive archaeology digs, linked especially to the development of the highway and railway systems. Many sites from the Neolithic and Bronze Age have been uncovered, demonstrating the importance of terrestrial sites, thus far less studied than the lakeside sites due to the latter’s powerful stratigraphy, the possibility of dendrochronology studies, and the generally exceptional conservation of the archaeological material offering the possibility of very detailed analysis. In addition, prospection was conducted in rock shelters in order to obtain a full corpus of prehistoric sites for the period. Concerning the Bell Beaker culture, there are a dozen of known deposits, among which two presented structures associated to archaeological material. These are the sites of Pre de Fonds in Bussy and La Baume in Villeneuve, both of which we present in this article.