
On May 10, 1881, Gabriel de Mortillet (1821-1898), one of the prominent French prehistorians of his time, wrote to Fiorentino Ameghino (1853-1911), a scholar from Argentina who was then living in Paris. He offered his “colleague”, as he called him, three prehistoric objects and enclosed a sketch with his letter (Figure 2).

All three objects came from French sites. A polished diorite axe, dated to the so-called “Robenhausian” period corresponding to the early Neolithic, and a bronze votive axe representative of that period, came from localities in the Côtes-du-Nord, now Côtes d’Armor, in northern Brittany. A carved point, representing the Solutrean period, came from Le Placard cave, in the Charente department.
The letter and the sketch are evidence, among others, of one of Ameghino’s key activities during his stay in Paris. Since the early 1870s, this teacher from the city of Mercedes in north-central Argentina had been searching the area and collecting both fossil bones and archaeological remains. By the mid-1870s, he was arguing that man had been contemporary with the great extinct animals of the Pampas and that human antiquity in these southern regions of America was equal to the antiquity now accepted in Europe. Circulating his ideas in the scholarly circles of Buenos Aires and in the Argentinian press, Ameghino also wrote to European scientists about his discoveries. In this way, he engaged in the debates about the antiquity of the American man that had been unfolding on both sides of the Atlantic for a decade.
In 1878, Ameghino traveled to Paris with his collection. He was in charge of the organization of the Argentinian exhibition of anthropological, archaeological and paleontological material at the 1878 World Fair. He spent three years in Paris and took advantage of this stay to meet influential scientists, mainly paleontologists, geologists, anthropologists and prehistorians. He attended several international congresses and became a member of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris in 1879, then of the Société géologique de France in 1880. While in Paris, he wrote a catalog of the items exhibited in the Argentinian anthropological exhibition, published together with Henri Gervais, the son of the professor of the National Museum of Natural History Paul Gervais, a catalog of the fossil mammals of South America, considered to be one of the most complete available at the time, and produced a long article in the Revue d’Anthropologie summarizing his ideas on the antiquity of man in the Pampas (Revue d’Anthropologie, 1879, 2, pp. 210-249). He also visited prehistoric sites and carried out excavations at Chelles (Seine-et-Marne), a site 20 kilometers northeast of Paris discovered in 1874, which he and Mortillet believed to be the oldest then known in France.
During his stay in Europe, Ameghino also put a lot of energy into selling and trading specimens exhibited by Argentina in 1878. He sold and bartered duplicates and casts from his own collection and collected, thanks to these exchanges, a set of European prehistoric objects and casts which allowed him to carry out comparisons with the remains discovered in Argentina. In his letters, he mentioned a total of more than 4000 European prehistoric objects so obtained through purchases, exchanges, donations and in excavations. The three items sketched by Mortillet were part of this set.
In 1886, Ameghino sold his collection to the province of Buenos Aires for inclusion into the Museo de La Plata, which had recently been founded by Francisco Moreno. He was then deputy director of this museum, before leaving to run the National Museum in Buenos Aires. The archaeological collection of the Ameghino is thus one of the important historical collections in the Museum of La Plata. It is now inventorized by the museum’s team of archaeologists under the direction of Mariano Bonomo, a task sometimes complicated by the lack of information on the provenance of the pieces. The Argentinian part of the collection is more easily studied, especially because the artefacts provided the factual basis for the important work that Ameghino published in 1880-1881 under the title La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata. The two volumes contain many plates, and the drawings are sufficiently precise to provide additional information about the objects. Some details can also be found in Ameghino’s catalogue of the Anthropological and Paleontological Section of the Argentine Republic at the Paris World Fair of 1878. Such is not the case for the European objects, for which no inventory was made at the time. Some of them carry indications written on labels or directly on the item. But others are completely devoid of such indications. Therefore, only a minority of these objects will probably be fully documented.
The Dinan axe sketched by Mortillet is one of the pieces that can be documented. It is the only one of the three specimens mentionned in the 1881 letter that has been found so far. Its shape and the inscription on the label, on which Mortillet’s handwriting can be recognized, allow us to identify it with certainty (Figure 1). This axe may have come from Mortillet’s own collection, or from excavations carried out in the area by the amateur Jules Lemoine, a watchmaker and jeweler from Lamballe, who gathered a remarkable set of stone and bronze axes in the 1870s and 1880s. This axe is typical of the duplicates that museums and private collectors kept specifically for exchange. It was given to Ameghino in return for fossil bones that he himself had donated to the Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris where Mortillet taught prehistoric anthropology.
This axe is fully representative of the economy of bartering between collectors. Its travel underlines the crucial role of duplicates in the circulation of objects. It also highlights the fluidity of the boundary between public and private collections. This axe may have been withdrawn either from Mortillet’s private collection, or from the Musée des antiquités nationales de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where Mortillet was in charge of the prehistoric collections. In any case, it came as compensation for a donation made to another institution, the Ecole d’anthropologie de Paris, in which Mortillet was a teacher. The trade occurred between some French public institutions and one or two private collectors. The intricacy of the exchange underscores the fact that the movement of specimens did not occur solely out of private into public collections – the only move that museum historiography has tended to focus on –, but that specimens also moved from public museums into private collections.
The Dinan axe in the La Plata Museum also illustrates the significance of types in the construction of collections and the interpretation of prehistory in the 19th century. It was chosen by Mortillet because it was, in his opinion, representative of the period called the Polished Stone Age, or “Robenhausian”. These type objects, which helped identify and place finds in a relative chronology, were described by Mortillet in an illustrated work setting out a form of canon, Le Musée préhistorique (1881). This book was a reference and guide for many prehistorians of the time, including Ameghino. The researchers tried to build up the most complete collections by gathering a series of artifacts corresponding to the one represented in the Musée préhistorique. The dissemination of these types allowed Mortillet to promote the timeline of prehistory that he had designed in the early 1870s. Furthermore Mortillet argued, as did many of his contemporaries, that the succession of industries observed in Europe had universal value, and that the European timeline was applicable throughout the world. Ameghino partly shared this conception and dated the remains found in Argentina by comparison with European objects and fauna-object associations. The European series brought back to Argentina and exhibited for a time in the Museum of La Plata thus provided a comparative reference.
To conclude, Mortillet sending Ameghino artifacts from the late Paleolithic and Neolithic periods may not be innocent, as the two scholars disagreed on the age of the remains found in Argentina. Ameghino claimed that some remains (incised bones and carved flints) proved the antiquity of the American man to be equal to that of the European. Mortillet was not convinced. In 1873, he examined, at the request of Paul Gervais, similar flints from Argentina and estimated that they dated from the early Neolithic (Journal de zoologie, 1873, 2, p. 233). In the Musée préhistorique, a single Argentinian flint is depicted. It is included in a plate dedicated to the Neolithic period (Musée préhistorique, 1881, pl. XLIV).
References :
Simón, C.; Bonomo, M.; Lanzelotti, S.; Suarez, G.A. “Materiality and Images: Ameghino’s Collection of La Antigüedad del Hombre en el Plata in the La Plata Museum, Heritage 2023, 6, 1605–1621. https://doi.org/10.3390/heritage6020086
Irina Podgorny, El sendero del tiempo y de las causas accidentales. Los espacios de la prehistoria en la Argentina, 1850-1910, Rosario, Prohistoria, 2009.
Irina Podgorny, Florentino Ameghino y hermanos: empresa argentina de paleontología ilimitada, Buenos Aires, Edhasa, 2021.
Nathalie Richard, Inventer la préhistoire. Les débuts de l’archéologie préhistorique en France, Paris, Vuibert-Adapt, 2008.