Rock of Solutré, Limestone summit in Saône-et-Loire, France

Rock of Solutré is a limestone outcrop in the Mâconnais wine region of Saône-et-Loire, rising sharply above the surrounding plain just west of Mâcon. Its western face drops in near-vertical cliffs while the eastern slope descends more gradually toward the vineyards below.

People hunted at this spot roughly 55,000 years ago, leaving behind flint tools and animal bones that built up in deep layers over thousands of years. Organized excavations began in 1866, uncovering one of the richest prehistoric deposits in western Europe.

The Solutrean culture takes its name from this site, where Gabriel de Mortillet coined the term in 1872 after the flint finds at the foot of the rock. The characteristic tools are flint blades shaped like laurel leaves, and the deposit was used by four Paleolithic civilizations between 35,000 and 10,000 BC. The rock also gave its name to the village of Solutré-Pouilly, and the surrounding slopes produce Pouilly-Fuissé wine.

The marked path up the rock was rerouted in the 1990s to protect the calcareous grassland and halt wear on the slopes, and the old car park was replaced by a new one set into the landscape. The Prehistory Museum, a plant-covered dome designed by Guy Clapot and opened in 1987, stands at the foot of the rock, not on the summit, and displays finds from the excavations in the place where they were discovered.

For a long time, it was believed that hunters drove herds of horses off the cliff edge here, but this theory has since been abandoned. The bones found on site accumulated gradually from hunting over many generations, not from a single dramatic event.