Waziers, le bas-terroir: history of ten years of archaeological research in a pleistocene marsh of the scarpe plain (2011-2021)

Over the past thirty years, the Hauts-de-France region has produced a significant number of Neanderthal occupations attributed to the Middle Palaeolithic, correlated with the end of the Middle Pleistocene and the beginning of the Upper Pleistocene. Despite these numerous discoveries, the Eemian - the last Interglacial (129-116 ka) - remains a little-known period on the palaeoenvironmental and anthropological level, an assessment valid for the northern half of France but also for the whole of North-western Europe, and more broadly for Western Europe. In this paper, we retrace the history of the discovery of a new, hitherto unknown, Eemian formation at Waziers (Nord). It takes on particular importance due to the good preservation and diversity of organic remains as well as the presence of archaeological elements. Despite many difficulties, the results obtained after ten years of exploration (2011-2021) at Waziers are abundant and of high quality. They are the result of several operations, led by several actors belonging to different institutions and co-signatories of this paper. We wanted to review here the history of discoveries and operations in order to clearly present the contributions of each intervention. The aim is also to show the importance of the complementarity of observations and the crucial nature of the collaboration of archaeological actors in the exploitation of such discoveries. The documentation collected during this decade of investigations is of prime importance because it is extremely rare to reconstruct the behavior of Neanderthals, the landscapes and environments they traversed and exploited during the Late Glacial of MIS 6 and the Eemian Interglacial. The site of Waziers joins the list of remarkable sites for the study of the Palaeolithic in the North of France (ie complex of sites of Cagny, Caours, Biache-Saint-Vaast or Renancourt) and is reminiscent of many aspects, in particular the quality preservation of its organic remains (especially plant) and by the extent of the preserved Pleistocene deposits, another exceptional Palaeolithic site in Western Europe, the Schoningen site complex.