Résumé
Southern France has a long tradition of archaeological research, as well as intensive preventive work over the last 20 years. In this exceptional geographic framework, archaeozoology benefits from a very large and well-contextualised database, but diachronic analyses and socio-economic syntheses become increasingly complicated.As part of the DEMETER project (resp. A. Evin), an exceptional collaboration of archaeozoologists in what are now the Languedoc and Provence regions has enabled the creation of an unprecedented database consisting of species quantification data (NISP) and bone and dental measurements acquired in almost 220 archaeological sites. Long-term changes in stature (Log Size Indexes values) and livestock compositions (relative proportion of Number of Identified Specimens) where studied over the last 8,000 years ago, starting with the Neolithic period in the region. More than 200 000 remains from 225 archaelogical sites were analyzed. The construction of the diachronic trends of size and in abundance of species revealed common trend break episodes that were confronted to paleoenvironmental and paleoclimatic reconstructions. All of these elements have contributed to the identification of five main chronological sequences that retrace the great history of animal morphologies over the last 8 millennia.