Séquence de comblement d’un paléovallon en contexte de plateau beauceron (290-10 ka): La coupe de Courville‑sur‑Eure (Eure‑et‑Loir, France)

The front of a quarry located at Courville-sur-Eure (Eure-et-Loir, France) revealed thick loamy deposits filling a palaeovalley incised in the Tertiary bedrock on the left bank of the Eure River. According to the macroscopic characteristics of the pedosedimentary units, a Quaternary age was presumed for this sequence. The scarcity of such accumulations in plateau context in the north of the Centre region led us to perform multiproxy analyses to document these deposits. Samples for luminescence datings and for grain size and chemical analyses are distributed throughout the whole sequence, whereas samples for micromorphology have only been taken in the middle part. According to the dating results, the infilling lasted from the second part of the Middle Pleistocene, around 290 ka ago, to the Holocene. Micromorphological and grain analyses concern units deposited between the Last Interglacial (Eemian) and the Weichselian Middle Pleniglacial. They demonstrate the development of multiphase cumulic soils regularly fed by limited lateral sedimentary inputs. At the scale of the region, this is only the third sequence benefiting from an absolute chronological frame after those of Bonneval (SUN et al., 2010; Despriée et al., 2018) and Illiers-Combray (Borderie et al., 2019). In addition to the chronostratigraphical aspect, such sequences are essential for research in preventive archaeological context owing to their important preservation potential for palaeolithic sites.