Rescue excavation carried out in 2011 at Béthencourt-sur-Somme (Somme, northern France), ahead of the Seine-Nord Europe Canal works, uncovered the margins of a Gallo-Roman rural settlement occupied from the Flavian period to the late 3rd century AD. Several tonnes of crushed cattle bones, lining a metalled road, are identified as the waste of a bone-glue workshop: strict selection of compact cattle bone, removal of the epiphyses, fragmentation with hammerstones and anvils. Combining zooarchaeology, lithic tools and collagen content measurements rules out the hypothesis of fat extraction and allows a complete operational sequence to be reconstructed. Well documented in urban contexts, this craft had remained invisible in rural settings. The status of the site, however, remains open: set within a dense network of villae, it cannot be linked to any specific estate, and a set of military equipment associated with a coin hoard further feeds the question.