tures derive from a collection of tales gathered in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the Hautes-Alpes. They all belong to the widespread, well structured narrative milieu of fairies and wild creatures. In this case the “Death Message of the Great Pan" may well provide a key to understanding. The initial motive is important, too: the period of rambling processions of the dead or, more general, the appearance of fairies, taken for the dead. Both are periodical phenomena, and the creatures concerned, which respond to human appeals for help, pay for it with a moment of eternity: seven to one hundred years. By means of these tales one can discover how migration can be interpreted as wandering about - a restlessness which may be understood, anthropologically and historically, together with the invention of purgatory, as the return of the dead.
PIERRE BINTZ AND THIERRY TILLET, "MIGRATION AND SEASONAL USUFRUCT OF THE ALPS IN PRE-HISTORIC TIMES"
Nomadic life belongs to the basic aspects of pre-historic hunter- and gatherer societies. Of interest is the question of in what manner, and with what motives, the groups of human beings organized their changes of locality in accordance with their needs and the bio-climatic pre-conditions, when confronted with the constraints of the Alps. In the last period of the Ice Age, with its great exension of glaciers, the mountain ranges formed an absolute obstacle for mankind. It is also of interest, therefore, to compare the modalities of intrusion and seasonal exploitation in the phases before and after this glacial period: In the Middle Palaeolithic Age findings illustrate seasonal strategies of advances into the higher pre-alpine regions; at the end of the Palaeolithic Age (from 14,000 BP onward) and in the Mesolithic Age (9,000-6,000 BP), the Alps, with returning favourable climatic conditions, once more become an attractive territory, within which can be documented various forms of migration.
