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that France has perhaps never fully recovered from its loss of talent in World War I and that that war broke colonial efforts into two segments. A third phase of investigations is the postindependence emergence of African national research aspirations.
The Maghrebian states of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia are the exception to the rule of marginalization even during the pre-1914 period. Large corps of colonial amateurs scoured the countryside around the major cities of Constantine, Tebessa, Oran, and Tunis. They established societies of prehistoire (Stone Age) and archeologie (classical archaeology), and each had its own publications, the first of which, the Journal de la Societe Archeologique de Constantine, was founded in 1894. Exceptionally, French professionals were attracted to North Africa, and one of them, P. Pallary, published the first monographic regional synthesis in 1909. For decades, the attraction for amateur, professional, and the whole of the metropolitan establishment was the so-called Capsian-Aurignacian debate.
Resemblances between the blade component of the Maghrebian Capsian and the European Aurignacian periods were remarked upon as early as 1890. It was, however, the professional prehistorian Jacques de Morgan who started the debate by claiming that the similarities were the result of independent development under similar environmental conditions. This position was consistent with the cultural evolutionist, paleoethnological school of gabriel de mortillet, but de Morgan was immediately criticized by some professional archaeologists such as Louis Capitan. De Morgan was particularly criticized by local amateur archaeologists who argued not only that a land bridge had once spanned the Mediterranean but also that North Africa was the source of the technological advances made during the Upper Paleolithic period. Breuil himself provisionally accepted the position of de Morgan’s opponents in 1912. Most influential among these amateurs was Albert Debruge, who described what he believed to be Neanderthaloid skeletal remains as “ancient Aurignacian.” These remains were found during his 1912, 1914, and 1923 excavations at the important site of Mechta El Arbi.
It was not until the 1940s that the Capsian was finally accepted as being much more recent than the Aurignacian. Significantly absent from the debate was the question of the advisability of classifying local assemblages in terms of the dominant tool typology of France. The bane of francophone African archaeology until very recently was this modified evolutionary presumption, that the stages of the French Paleolithic period anticipated identical or analogous stages elsewhere and that such stages could be recognized by a relatively few type tools (fossiles directeurs).
A racist view of the world lay behind the making of highly subjective surface collections of “belles pieces” in the forested lowland basin of central Africa. Bored stones and fine-ground stone axes had been carried back to French-occupied territory by early explorers (e.g., H.M. Stanley and G. Schweinfurth), and this tradition was continued by the administrators and engineers of the early days of French and Belgian colonialism. These collections of artifacts became primary evidence for the theories of cultural evolutionists such as E. Dupont, the head of the Belgian Royal Institute of Natural Sciences. These evolutionists argued that all people throughout the world went through the same stages in the manufacturing of implements and tools, based on the similarity of African stone tools and those found in Europe. They also argued that different people passed from manufacturing stage to manufacturing stage at a faster or a slower rate determined by their race, their environment, or both. Well into the twentieth century, ethnographies of stone tools using “contemporary ancestors, such the forest Pygmies,” were used to illustrate the lifestyles of Paleolithic peoples.
Stone and metal tools were displayed in the Central African Geological Exhibition at King Leopold II’s imperialistic showpiece, the 1897 Brussels International Exhibition. Two years later, one of the geologists responsible, X. Stainier, published L’Âge de la Pierre au Congo, in which he sought to demonstrate the backwardness of the African peoples. For Stainier, African prehistory simply replicated (albeit more recently
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