
During my travels with SciCoMove, I came across an object that connects almost all the project partners. It is a label bearing the initials CL, associated with a location and a date (fig. 1). I found it in Barcelona, in the collections currently held by the Archaeology Museum of Catalonia; in Heidelberg, in the collections of the university’s Institute of Prehistory; in Neuchâtel, in the collections of the Laténium; in Mexico City, in the showcases of the UNAM Geology Museum; and in the Museum of La Plata. This label can be defined as a “paraobject”, to borrow a notion coined by José Beltrán (CNRS, TEMOS UMR 9016), now associated with SciCoMove. It is separate from the specimen to which it is affixed, but is intimately associated with it, providing additional information about its history.
What do the initials “CL” stand for?
These two letters refer to two well-known figures in the history of prehistoric archaeology [Coye, 1998; Richard, 2008]. Together, in the 1860s, they excavated the sites in southwestern France whose names appear on the labels.
The first was Edouard Lartet (1801-1871). Born in south-western France, he studied law in Toulouse and Paris. During his stay in the French capital, he became interested in the natural sciences and, on his homecoming, turned away from the practice of law to dedicate himself to paleontology. A full-time amateur, he explored the Sansan site in the Gers department, where he discovered fossil monkey bones. The Ministry of Public Instruction and the Academy of Sciences were so interested in his discoveries that they funded his research, and remains of “Pliopithecus” (1836) and “Driopithecus” (1856) found in the department of Gers were sent to the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. These fossils played an instrumental role in the debate on the antiquity of man. Indeed, if it could be asserted that anthropoid apes existed in geologically ancient times, it became credible to assume that man, a related species, also lived in those remote periods. Lartet himself took an interest in this question, and from 1860 onwards undertook excavations, notably in the Aurignac shelter (Haute-Garonne), where he discovered bones of extinct animals and human artefacts [Laurent 1993; Lartet archives online at https://tolosana.univ-toulouse.fr/corpus/archives-prehistoriens ]. Based on the data gathered during his excavations, Lartet proposed the first chronology of prehistoric human times in 1861, suggesting that ages be identified according to the fauna associated with the remains [Lartet 1861, Richard 1992]. He identified the age of the cave bear, the age of the elephant and rhinoceros, the age of the reindeer and the age of the aurochs. Although his ideas were quickly challenged, the term “Age of the Reindeer” has survived to this day. At the end of his life, his national and international recognition as a paleontologist earned Lartet an appointment as a Professor at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in 1869. However, his health prevented him from carrying out this function, and he died in 1871.
From 1863 onwards, Lartet collaborated with the British Henry Christy (1810-1865) to carry out excavations on several sites in the Vézère valley (Dordogne). The letter C on the label refers to this London banker who developed a passion for ethnography and archaeology and, from the 1850s onwards, travelled extensively in Europe and the Americas. In 1856, for instance, he travelled to Mexico with the would-be anthropologist Edward Tylor [Stocking, 1991]. He gathered an extensive collection, which was bequeathed to the British Museum after his death. When he was carrying out fieldwork with Lartet, he was a member of several British learned societies, including the Society of Antiquaries, the Geological Society and the Ethnological Society of London.
In the Vézère valley, Lartet and Christy collected a large amount of archaeological material, the contents of which they published in numerous scientific periodicals. These articles were compiled in a sumptuous 17-volume publication financed by Christy and finalized after the death of the two authors. The publication, entitled Reliquiae Diluvianae (London, Williams & Norgate, 1865-1875), also contained a large number of illustrations. The results of Lartet and Christy’s research at Les Eyzies, in the caves of Laugerie-Haute and Laugerie-Basse, Gorge d’Enfer, Madeleine and Le Moustier were thus described in great detail and widely publicized in the scholarly community. Their findings were also presented in exhibitions. The flints and engraved bones discovered in the Vézère valley featured prominently in the first exhibition featuring prehistory at a World Fair, which took place in Paris in 1867. In the section dedicated to work history, an engraved bone depicting a mammoth discovered at La Madeleine caused a major buzz [Quiblier, 2014]. Objects from the Lartet and Christy collections were also donated to the Musée des antiquités nationales, inaugurated in 1867 in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, where galleries were dedicated to prehistory.
Lartet also donated parts of his collection to the Muséum de Toulouse and the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, where the engraved mammoth from La Madeleine is kept [Paillet, 2011]. Christy, for his part, bequeathed his collection to the British Museum, but the catalogue that was drawn up focused on ethnographic objects and was almost entirely silent on the prehistoric remains it contained [Catalogue of a collection of ancient and modern stone implements […] in the possession of Henry Christy, London, Taylor & Francis, 1862]. In these museums, some of the objects donated directly by the founders bear the CL label. It can be seen, for example, on the reverse of the plaque with the mammoth. It is therefore legitimate to infer that the label was affixed to the objects during the lifetime of the two collectors.
The presence of the “CL” label in a large number of institutions on several continents indicates that a significant fraction of the objects collected by Lartet and Christy did not end up in these museums. What happened to this part of the collection is a complex and as yet unknown story. A large number of specimens travelled via a variety of intermediaries. The reasons and practical modalities of this vast circulation are worth investigating, even if many of the conclusions may remain largely speculative.
To be followed…
Références
Coye N., 1998, La préhistoire en paroles et en actes, Paris, L’Harmattan.
Lartet É., 1861, « Nouvelles recherches sur la coexistence de l’homme fossile et des grands mammifères fossiles réputés caractéristiques de la dernière période géologique », Annales des Sciences naturelles, II, Zoologie, 177-253 ; extraits dans Richard N., 1992, L’invention de la préhistoire : anthologie, p. 105-126, https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k48129014
Laurent G., 1993, « Edouard Lartet (1801-1871) et la paléontologie humaine », Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française, tome 90, n°1, p. 22-30.
Paillet P., 2011, “Le mammouth de la Madeleine (Tursac, Dordogne)”, PALEO, 22, p. 223-270. https://doi.org/10.4000/paleo.2143
Quiblier C., 2014, « L’exposition préhistorique de la Galerie de l’Histoire du travail en 1867. Organisation, réception et impacts », Les Cahiers de l’École du Louvre [En ligne], 5. https://doi.org/10.4000/cel.470
Richard N., 2008, Inventer la préhistoire. Les débuts de l’archéologie préhistorique en France, Paris, Vuibert/Adapt.
Stocking G. [1991], Victorian Anthropology, New York, Free Press.