ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Name for Things: Terminologies, Debates and Retrospective Narratives on the Question of the Transition between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic in French Metropolitan Prehistory (1870-1890)

• In Event: Histories of Archaeology 1

English Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, the nature of the articulation between the two great periods of Prehistory, the Paleolithic and the Neolithic, is posed according to new modalities in French metropolitan prehistory. Some discussions, during meetings of learned societies and congresses, are crystallized in the early 1870s around two terms: 'hiatus' and 'lacune'. The first, inherited from the vocabulary of geology, describes a break in the recording of archaeological occupations. The second carries its share of ambivalences: is it proof of a gradual change in prehistoric populations or, conversely, of a sudden upheaval? Settling the issue and giving a name to things is quickly at the heart of these tense exchanges. Beyond showing the diversity of perceptions of time that underlies words, these debates show the encounters between actors, disciplines, conceptions of the past and uses, visible through power games, factors of credibility and regimes of evidence invoked to be authoritative in a prehistoric circle under construction. The approach of prehistoric studies is formalized at the convergence of a multiplicity of sciences, natural and human (geology, paleontology, anthropology, history, archaeology). This communication, in a historical, archival and epistemological approach, proposes to return to these elements, witnesses of what guarantees scientificity for a field of study that fights for recognition of its legitimacy. This episode is moreover regularly depicted a posteriori as a major controversy in the development of the chronological framework of Prehistory. The disciplinary memory of this fact makes it possible to question in a different light the tendency that prehistory has to constantly tell its own story, in a logic of legitimation and claim of primacy.

Author

• Caroline Bousquet, Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle (France)