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Quatrefages, Jean Louis Armand de

(1810–1892)

Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages studied medicine at the University of Strasbourg and practiced as a doctor in the southwestern French city of Toulouse until 1840 when he moved to Paris to become a scientific writer and illustrator. De Quatrefages was a talented draftsman and began to work for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris while publishing extensively on invertebrate biology and classification.

In 1850, he was appointed to a university chair of natural history, but in 1855 he returned to the museum to take up the chair of anthropology (formerly anatomy and human natural history) and his research and publications became focused on anthropological issues. He was strongly opposed to Darwinian evolutionary theory and to the theories of English scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, and he remained firmly convinced that mankind had not evolved from apes but was a separate entity in the rest of the animal world. He was also against polygenism and an opponent of the French anthropologist Paul Broca.

Although a conservative, de Quatrefages was an early believer in the idea of human antiquity, which, allied with his anti-evolutionist views, explains why he was such an ardent supporter of the authenticity of the moulin-quignon Jaw. De Quatrefages’s major publication, Crania ethnica (1882), produced jointly with colleague Theodore Hamy, followed the rejection of his arguments concerning the validity of the Moulin-Quignon fossil. The book stands as his most significant contribution to the debate about the nature of human physical evolution in Europe.

Tim Murray

See also

Falconer, Hugh; French Archaeology in the Classical World

References

Hamy, E.T. 1870. Précis de paléontologie humaine. Paris: Ballière.

Quebec

In Quebec, it is said that everything began in 1960 with the outburst of what has been called the Quiet Revolution. This was the time when the people of Quebec decided to change their country, to cast aside fear and silence, to shake the traditional basis of social power, and to share in urbanized North America’s every positive move toward success and efficiency. The gradual results of this changed perspective had quite an impact on archaeology.

In 1960, the 1,540,680 square kilometers of Quebec was perhaps the largest archaeological terra incognita in the whole western world. There were no university training programs, no governmental sponsorship of archaeological studies, and no professional archaeologists. The word archaeology itself had almost no meaning. It was culturally irrelevant.

Certainly several artifacts had been found since the establishment of Europeans in the area. For instance, Samuel de Champlain dug through a prehistoric Amerindian site in 1608 when he set the foundations of his trading post