Domestic blade production, long blades and networks in North-Eastern Balkan Copper Age (5th mill.).

Résumé En

In the early 5th millenium, a vaste entity termed « Graphite Pottery Zone » in the Balkan Peninsula underwent radical transformation : emergence of hereditary social hierarchy, specialization and regionalization of productions, highly organized long distance exchange, and technological innovations. It concerns particularly the specialized production of very long flint blades. In north-east Bulgaria, near Razgrad, Ravno is a good-quality flint deposit and the tell of Kamenovo is a normal village of the Graphite Pottery Zone, but with two major differences : the village is located on a flint deposit and the inhabitants carried out long blade production by lever pressure as prestige items. The raw material procurement of Kamenovo combines an exploitation of flint on the site for the domestic production and exploitation at short distance (Ravno) of exceptional raw material for specialized production. The reason to live away from the Ravno source matches the fact that Ravno was probably exclusively exploited by the specialists maybe as a protected area, and that long blade debitage is not an intensive production. One can suggest that intensive exploitation develops when an object is not or no longer a prestige item.