Pigeon-vole ! Re-connaissance d'une gravure armoricaine du Ve millénaire

Abstract

A "flushed " bird is engraved on the Bronzo stela, in full flight, its head turned to the exterior, superposed over a white quartz vein; a crook, equally treated in cut-away engraving, bars its passage. At a first reading, a plausible identification of the bird seemed to prevail and the Columbidae met with our approval. However, more deliberate analysis and an effort at the graphic deconstruction of the motif allows the identification to be reconsidered and improved, by describing the various filters authorising the rejection of such or such a category, finally preserving the best claimants to the only possible confrontation, opposing Corvidae to Columbidae. The Bronzo representation is equivalent in substance and in structure to the scenes on the neighbouring stelae where a phallus is opposed to the sharp edge of an axe blade (Mané Rutual), while a sperm-whale confronts the coalition of animals and human tools (Table des Marchand). However Bronzo is a deformed toponym, untranslatable as such; why not search in a more or less recent past, through some unavoidable semantic or linguistic evolution, for traces of a probable or possible mutation of the word ? At the end of a brief investigation, we suggest that the expression Men Bran Sao, "The Stone of the Standing Raven", known from the early 19th century, is the name of this monolith. Nevertheless, the last time that a bird was directly observed on this stela was during the 5th millennium; the two closely connected fragments, on the model of the neighbouring Grand Menhir, prove that the stone has not been displaced since that distant period. We consequently propose this explanatory hypothesis to explain in Bronzo such a radical change of name: a zoomorphic mythical entity that we recognize as a pigeon, attached since time immemorial to the stela in question, passed under the influence of the Brittonic language and the new culture to the designation of another ornithological entity, the raven. If a bird as clearly identified as the Bronzo has played a determining role in the mythical Neolithic Armorican bestiary, like the sperm-whale, a scientific step is now necessary to find some hidden occurrences in other poorly understood signs, since such an important representation in our interpretive schema, unique in Brittany, cannot remain isolated. We correspondingly claim, in this coherent and logical research prolonging the Bronzo discovery, that the only possible appropriate solution for the famous "horn" signs is a bird shown full on, inflight, with spread wings.

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