Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The covered driveway of the coast of the Libera, located in Arronville in Val-d'Oise, was discovered in February 1884 during the exploitation of a lutean limestone quarry. A local commission, including Mayor M. Chouchet and Abbé Barret (curé d'Amblainville) and Grimot (curé de l'Isle-Adam), immediately proceeded to search. The building, facing east-south-east/west-north-west, has a structure partially carved into the rock, with limestone orthostats surmounted by dry stones. Its entrance, closed by a slab pierced by a characteristic "d'homme hole", suggested a stick-locking system, typical of the dolmens of the Seine-Oise-Marne culture.

The 12-metre-long funeral chamber, according to Fr Grimot, housed 180 skulls (men, women, children), now dispersed, as well as furniture composed of flint tools, a bone punch, a deer stew and coarse ceramic coats decorated with fingerprints. The antechamber was destroyed in 1901 when an adjacent road was enlarged. Ranked a historic monument on January 25, 1963, the roadway was restored in 1970 by the Regional Archaeology Service, after damage caused by carriageers in the 19th century.

The architecture reveals an adaptation to the relief: the aisle, on a natural slope, was covered by a roof table of 3 meters wide side bedside, while the natural ceiling, partially destroyed, could reach 2.50 meters high. The floor paved with limestone pads and the cupules engraved on the entrance slab testify to complex funeral and symbolic practices. The excavations, although rapid and without a thorough anthropological study, made it possible to document a major site of francilian megalithism, linked to a sedentary neolithic community engaged in farming and livestock.

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