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Maria Beatrice Di Brizio : Edward Burnett Tylor and the Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865) : Exotic Prehistory and the Three-Age System

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), leading voice of British Victorian anthropology, is seldom recognised for his theoretical contributions to the sciences of prehistory. Except for his definitions of ethnographic comparatism as a means to access man's immemorial past, his reflections are rarely mentioned by historians of these disciplines. Nevertheless, Arnaud Hurel has shown that Tylor contributed to the debates of the 1860s by theorising the succession of the Stone and Metal Ages in China, in his work entitled Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization. Following these historiographical suggestions, we will examine the Tylorian treatment of exotic prehistory and focus our analysis on the first edition of the Researches, which was published in London in 1865 and prepared in the years 1862-1864. We will thus see that the Researches endeavour to generalise the Stone Age to all regions of the globe. In meeting this challenge, which recognised prehistorians such as John Lubbock (1834-1913) refused to take up in 1865, Tylor offers a comparative overview of extra-European archaeology, linguistics and ethnography, as well as of data on European prehistory, languages and folklore. We will highlight the methodological aspects and theoretical issues of the Researches pages which aim to demonstrate the universality of the Stone Age, and the conceptual tools employed by Tylor : the notions of traces, cases of superstition, relics, which were later denoted by the term survivals.

Adèle Chevalier (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, UMR 7194) :Defining 'exotic prehistory' through its museum objects

Museums associated non-European societies with prehistory through ethnographic comparativism – jointly exhibiting national archeology and distant ethnography – or mixing ethnography of current and ancient "primitive" peoples.

When, in the first third of the twentieth century, uses of ethnographic comparativism were more and more reviewed, ethnographic collections became uninteresting for archaeological museums. And, although since the nineteenth century, non-European prehistoric remains flocked to Europe, this moment was also one of a progressive acceptance of a prehistory outside Europe and the development of excavations and scientific work in these areas.

In 1933, the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) opened a section of “exotic prehistory”, separating the old "primitives" from the current ones. The purpose of this communication is to understand the change of status of the extra-European prehistoric collections when “exotic prehistory” is being constituted and institutionalized. What the museum acceptance of an "exotic prehistory" means? Was this a moment of parting between what is ancient and what is other, or did the bridges between ethnography and prehistory remained despite a museography which, at the Trocadéro, took a turn by dissociating them? What does this mean of the way European scientific institutions viewed so-called “primitive” societies and their ancient past?

These questions will be asked through the analysis of the itinerary of a sample of the so-called exotic prehistoric collections of the MET, their apprehension by scientist and museum actors and the practices of which they were the object.

Maddalena Cataldi (Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, UMR 7194) : From aboriginal art to primitive art. Circulation and construction of the etho-prehistorical knowledge within the British Empire.

Prehistoric archeology, when emerges in the second half of the 19th century, is built on a vast heritage of data, which had converged from all the colonial territories to the metropolitan associations for centuries. Among this heritage, we are interested in the copies of Australian Wandjina paintings published by George Gray (1812-1898) in 1841, and republished again in 1906 in by H. Breuil and E. Cartailhac (La caverne d’Altamira à Santillana près Santander (Espagne).

The paper briefly retraces the circumstances of this discovery and places it in the context of contemporary debates about the antiquity and the ethnic origin of the authors of these paintings. Grey was a keen observer and despotic administrator and his ethnography serves as the basis for the social policies of his colonial administration.

Beatrice Falcucci (Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Turin/American Academy in Rome) : Living fossils: Palethnology and Ethnographic Collections in Italian Colonial Museums (1871-1940)

For the Italian case study, the peculiar period that marked the beginning of colonial expansion also coincided with the development of positivist disciplines: palethnology (prehistoric archeology), ethnology and anthropology.

Therefore, the paper will highlight how the development and diffusion of such disciplines, aimed at reconstructing the country's (pre)history scientifically, overlapped with the process of legitimization of the new colonial possessions.

The study will focus on the interactions, within Italian museums in the metropolitan State and in the colonies, between ethnographic objects of “present” colonial subject populations, and fossil and palethnographic remains of pre-Roman Italian populations. Taking as a starting point the International Congress of Anthropology and Prehistoric Archaeology that took place in Bologna in 1871, and the significant words of Luigi Pigorini about the “selvaggi e barbari viventi”, the presentation will go through the main Italian museums of ethnology and conclude with an analysis of the Libyan Museum of Natural History in Tripoli.

Alice Leplongeon (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) : Influences of the European model of prehistory in Egypt at the beginning of the 20^th century: case studies from the works of Paul Bovier-Lapierre (1873-1950) and Edmond Vignard (1885-1969)

The prehistory of Egypt distinguishes from the prehistory of other African regions, by the use of terminologies specific to the region, and often stemming from the European model of Prehistory. This is for example apparent in the persistent use of the term ‘Palaeolithic’, instead of the use of the African terminology ‘Stone Age’, which is common usage in the rest of the African continent, including since recently in north-western Africa. The unique geographic situation of the Nile Valley makes it a key region to study research topics such as hominin expansions out of Africa, as well as back into Africa. These topics have recently seen a renewed interest, in link with the developments of genetic studies. Comparisons of archaeological data from the Nile Valley with those from neighbouring regions are critical to discuss hypotheses of contacts between populations from different regions in prehistory. Recent publications focusing on these hypotheses however underline the difficulty of making such comparisons and mention several reasons to explain this, including the lack of recent research in the Egyptian Nile Valley, the nature and type of prehistoric sites that are preserved, as well as a different research history in North-Eastern Africa and Egypt in particular, perhaps in link with its pharaonic past, that would have influenced archaeological interpretations and led to an artificial isolation of the region from the rest of the continent.

This presentation aims to contribute to a better understanding of the extent to which the history of research in prehistory in Egypt could have created paradigms, that are still currently active. First, a brief overview of the construction of the prehistory in Egypt will be presented. This can be divided into three main phases: (1) a phase of emergence (1869-1886/1925) corresponding to the identification of stone tools of Palaeolithic type, and in particular the recognition of their antiquity ; (2) a phase of development, particularly in the interwar years, with the organisation of European and Egyptian survey and excavations campaigns within and outside the Nile Valley (ca. 1915 – 1960); and (3) a peak of prehistoric research in the region at the occasion of the building of the Aswan dam (1960-1971), mainly led by US-based researchers, which will trigger a renewed interest in the prehistory of the region until the end of the 1980s. Since then, palaeolithic research in Egypt, despite limited recent fieldwork, has lost impetus. Following this brief summary of the history of palaeolithic research in Egypt, the presentation will focus on two case studies related to the second phase of palaeolithic research in the regions, the works from Paul Bovier-Lapierre in the Abbassieh near Cairo (1918) and the works from Edmond Vignard in the Kom-Ombo region (1920-1923). Results from their surveys and excavations are still abundantly cited in recent literature on the prehistory of the region. We will detail the historical and scientific contexts of these early works in order to discuss how they may implicitly or explicitly still guide the current interpretation of the Egyptian prehistoric record.

Nathan Schlanger (École nationale des chartes) : Imperial Prehistory and Austral Africa in the 19th century

Far from being a simple zone of confirmation of arguments established elsewhere, the European-dominated tropical lands actually represent a founding landscape for the birth of the prehistoric discipline in the latter half of the 19th century. This little known contribution is perceptible at theoretical levels (with regards to human nature and its potentialities) and also at a methodological or disciplinary level (by focussing attention on the tangible vestiges of early humanity). Drawing principally on the history of prehistoric archaeology in southern Africa, I will identify and debate several moments in this co-construction, spanning from the 1860s to the 1930s.

Chloé Rosner (Lille-3, UMR 7041 ARCSAN): A possible local prehistory : Jean Perrot, French and Israeli prehistory

Jean Perrot (1920-2012) arrived in British Mandate Palestine at the end of the Second World War. He initially collaborated with archaeologists such as René Neuville who significantly contributed to the development of prehistory research in the Levant. Drawing upon his personal and professional trajectory, we will address the part played by French institutions and methodology in the shaping of Israeli archaeology and more specifically prehistory which emerged after 1948.