Prehistory and anthropology between science, philosophy, politics and internationalism: Gabriel de Mortillet
During the 19th century, the intellectual and material construction of prehistoric archaeology was a complex process with multiple origins.
This process was accompanied by the development of a historiographic narrative with the aim of legitimising the place, role and autonomy of the nascent discipline. Until the end of the 19th century, archaeology was generally practiced by scholars belonging to a range of disciplines (historians, philologists, ethnologists, physicians, palaeontologists, geologists, etc.) and was entwined with anthropology. The material remains of the past were analysed from a wide variety of viewpoints that overlapped in a complex manner and according to theoretical aims that were sometimes not quite the same for all of these scholars. However, dominant trends and currents of thought structured these different approaches, allowing prehistoric archaeology to detach itself from strictly antiquarian, historical and naturalistic practices and reflections and to adopt its own methodology and approach.
Over the past thirty years or so, researchers from various scientific backgrounds have attempted to go beyond this original historiography, and the gaps implicit in a simple historical narrative, to examine the complexity and richness of the discipline's construction. This new work has marked a renewed interest in Prehistory among the scientific community, in France and the rest of Europe. The strong historical appropriation of these questions, now established as a field of study, has marked a break with the past. It has made it possible to open up reflection with a real intellectual and social contextualization of the discipline by taking into consideration collective and individual approaches. This colloquium will therefore be an opportunity to re-examine concepts, facts, objects, methods and people in a multidisciplinary approach and within a wider geographical framework.
The bicentenary of the birth of Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-1898) provides an opportunity to make this assessment through one of the major actors in European prehistory and protohistory, whose influence was decisive in the second half of 19th century and beyond. The ideas championed by Mortillet, his interpretative frameworks and his chrono-typological method, as well as his very personality affected a whole generation of prehistorians and protohistorians.
The aim of this colloquium is not to evoke his memory or to produce a biographical study as such, but rather to follow the thread of the unique development of this eminent personality in order to shed light on the characteristics of a scientific world view, in its time, in its context (intellectual, institutional...), in its objects and in its archaeological practice.
The career of Mortillet, an engineer and geologist by training, a militant and atheist student in Paris, a museum curator, a publisher, a radical republican elected representative, is in many ways illustrative of the interplay between science, the social project and philosophical considerations. His intellectual career, his political commitment (socialism, radicalism), his intellectual formation (materialism and undoubtedly freemasonry), his travels (political exile and scientific trips), his experiences in the field, his written contributions (periodicals, monographs), the recognition by his peers (professional positions, building up collections in museums, transmission of knowledge, involvement in the institutions created by Broca), will be taken into account during the symposium to shed light on the conditions of practice specific to anthropologists and prehistorians as well as their contributions to the practices and techniques, teaching and history of prehistoric archaeology.
The colloquium "Prehistory and Anthropology between Science, Philosophy, Politics and Internationalism" is organized in three thematic sessions.
Keywords
Prehistory, protohistory, history, museums, collections, heritage, archives
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