The
End of Bronze Age and the Beginning of Iron Age
(800-450 BC)
The village of Mourèze is situated on the left bank of the
river Doubie, an affluent to the river Hérault, 7 km of Clermont-L’Hérault
and approximately 30 km of Agde-Agathe (fig.1). It is situated at
the edge of an extraordinary natural park, a chaotic assembly of
rocks with ruin like formations of dolomite limestone. Since the
Middle Ages its highest rock pillar had been used for building a
fortification, a castrum already mentioned in the 10th century and
of which only a few remains still exist today. *
The protohistoric settlement is
found 300 meters east of the village at the edge of a small passage,
the only gateway from the valley of the river Hérault to
the valley of the river Orb via the pass of Merquière. The
findings are concentrated along an oblong courtyard of about 4.000
sqm with a south/south expansion, which was called “Courtinals”.
This area was surrounded by an almost uninterrupted barrier of rocks
overtopping the site and reaching heights between 2 and 40 meters
in its inner section at about 220 m above sealevel, the lower sections
of the rockwalls form small natural spaces used by men since the
Mid Stone Age as numerous lithic and ceramic founds testify.
G. VASSEUR has described the habitat of
the Early Iron Age in the context of a publication on a Bronze Age
mine in the adjacent village of Cabrières. This habitat is
probably the origin of some ceramic finds which are exhibited in
the Borély Museum in Marseille and described by VASSEUR in
1914. These object consist of material dating from the end of Bronze
Age III, but also back in the 4th and 5th century BC: ceramics from
Attica of a still today unknown species, fragments of vases with
and without handles, attic ceramics with red figures, western Greek
ceramics made with oxidizing burning techniques and ceramics originating
of the Spanish-Languedoc-region .
Fig. 1
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Courtinals 
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