Aubenas-les-Alpes is a commune in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of south-eastern France.

[4] Access to the commune is by road D555 which branches off the D5 some 4 km north of Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire and goes west by a circuitous route to the village.

[5] The Largue river forms the eastern border of the commune as it flows south to eventually join the Durance east of Manosque.

Many tributaries rise in the commune and flow east to join the Largue including the Ravin d'Aiguebelle and the Riou.

[6] The village is however located on a hill of red marl of the Oligocene period and has yielded bones of large mammals and reptiles (crocodile and turtle).

In the Aiguebelle valley (a stream that never runs dry even in the most severe droughts) fossils of plants and fish (Smerdi macrurus) have also been found.

Along the Largue and the Aiguebelle towards Vachères and Revest-des-Brousses, the Oligocene limestone contains lenses of brown flint which were extensively exploited from the Middle Paleolithic (Levallois-type industry) to the end of the Neolithic period.

According to Charles Rostaing, Aubenas comes from the Gallic alba with the suffixes -enne and -ate, in the general sense of a "citadel".

[17] The territory of the commune was inhabited in the Middle Paleolithic period but it was especially in the Neolithic that the area experienced increased human activity.

In 1906, Mr. Deydier mentioned the existence of many Neolithic flint quarries over an area of hundreds of hectares in the communes of Saint-Michel-l'Observatoire, Vachères, and Aubenas-les-Alpes.

In several parts of the commune there are ceramic Tegulae[21] and Terra sigillata which indicate occupation in Gallo-Roman times.

In Antiquity the Aubenas area was part of the land of the Sogiontiques (Sogiontii),[22] whose territory extended from the Baronnies to the Durance.

[23] While the south-east of Gaul was Burgundian land, the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric the Great, conquered the region between the Durance, the Rhône, and Isère in 510.

In order to reconcile with the Burgundian king Godomar III, the Ostrogothic regent Amalasontha gave him the territory.

As with many communes in the department, Aubenas had a school well before the Jules Ferry laws: in 1863 it already had one that provided primary education for boys in the chief town.

[31] Gules, a Roman letter A of Or from the transverse of which is interlaced an oval annulet the same posed in pale with a small latin cross the same attached below.

[51] The Church of the Assumption of the Virgin and the Presbytery on a square shaded by hundred-year-old Linden trees are the last remains of the medieval village.