Par EXistenZ — Travail personnel, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16615714

This conference by Fanny Bocquentin, a CNRS Research Fellow, is organized by the Society of Friends of the National Archaeology Museum. It will take place on Saturday, September 12, 2026, at 10:30 AM, in the auditorium of the National Archaeology Museum, Place Charles de Gaulle, Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

At the end of the Paleolithic, the Near East experienced a unique trajectory that would have a decisive impact on the future of this region and all of Europe. Previously mobile hunter-gatherer communities settled in a territory and established the very first hamlets. The Natufians were the architects of this shift, which took place 15,000 years ago in the Levant. The first traces of these sedentary hunter-gatherer communities were discovered nearly a century ago in the Wadi-en-Natuf by D.A.E. Garrod, whose scientific archives are preserved by the National Archaeology Museum.
Thanks to the cumulative materiality on a single site, Natufian archaeological sites reveal traces of a period where the abundance of social interactions is tangible, and cultural and biological changes can be observed over just a few generations. Over time, sedentariness durably transformed societies, which adopted specific subsistence strategies, technical systems, mobility patterns, exchange methods, and identity expressions. While these did not exclude periodic returns to nomadism, they nevertheless placed these last hunter-gatherers on a new evolutionary path. The first agricultural communities that emerged at the beginning of the Neolithic inherited this legacy. After a few millennia of local experimentation with this new economic and social model, they would go on to conquer Europe, shaping the foundations of our society. In this evolutionary fresco, where long-term processes and adaptive leaps coexist, the boundary between the Paleolithic and Neolithic blurs.
This conference will present the most recent advances in identifying and understanding this process of sedentarization. It will revisit the modalities and rhythms of the changes observed in craft production, architecture, village organization, and relations with neighboring communities. It will also explore the role of the deceased in this new configuration of territories and habitats, as well as the insights they still provide into the biological characteristics of these first sedentary populations.

After the conference, Fanny Bocquentin will sign copies of her book: La mort à l’œil nu (CNRS Éditions, 2023).