developed in Europe more as a cultural phenomenon than as a branch of archaeology. The philological research of scholars like Champollion or sir henry rawlinson mattered more at that time than did the work of explorers like Botta or austen layard. But the years 1830 to 1850 were decisive for the French study of prehistory quite independently of these other developments (Laming-Emperaire 1964). Prehistory in France grew out of anthropology, which had utterly different philosophical roots.

Despite his literary interests and his general culture, which were influenced by the Enlightenment, Boucher de Perthes helped create a type of prehistoric archaeology that owed little to the antiquaries of the eighteenth century. The natural history of mankind—as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, and to which the anthropological school of physical anthropologist Paul Broca made a substantial contribution—was very much a branch of natural science that devised its methods by analyzing remains directly in the field. It turned to experimentation and ethnological comparison for the same assistance that classical archaeology derived from aesthetics. This major difference still divides the field of archaeology and explains why prehistory and classical archaeology have had such dissimilar fates in France. Men like Jacques Boucher De Perthes, édouard lartet, and gabriel de mortillet never had positions in the French academic system. And although Lartet was appointed late in life to the Museum of Natural History (where he did not have time to take up his chair) and de Mortillet was given a curatorship at the Museum of National Antiquities, French prehistorians were doubly excluded from academe until the 1950s, barred from both arts and science faculties. At the very time that French prehistory was making an impact on the study of archaeology worldwide, thanks to the wealth of finds in France and to de Mortillet’s abilities as an organizer and theoretician, it was completely lacking in resources for action. Within France, nevertheless, de Mortillet’s nomenclature and his typological definition of lithic industries were adopted as the frame of reference for the study of prehistory. But although the discipline was magnificently equipped to investigate Paleolithic periods, it had to look elsewhere—to Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, and Central Europe—for the elements it needed in order for the study of French protohistory to develop beyond its earliest stages. Despite the work of Déchelette, prematurely ended by his death in the First World War, French protohistorical archaeology never raised itself to the same standard as archaeology in Scandinavia or Central Europe. Excavations were few in number and depended entirely on private funding, and although oscar montelius’s methods were acknowledged and adopted, they never generated original extensions.

A Long Period in the Wilderness

After the First World War, the Durkheim “school” of sociology, under its director, anthropologist Marcel Mauss, resumed its work. Faithful to the universalist traditions of the Enlightenment, it broadened its approach to include linguistics, comparative studies (comparatisme), and Orientalism. However, the archaeology of France itself did not seem able to develop, or to raise much interest. The state continued to exist, in conjunction with national unity, and in contrast to what happened in Germany nationalist claims were still not sufficiently intense to generate the idea of a foundation myth and a national archaeology. There had never needed to be any appeals to the origins, prehistory, and protohistory of France in order to legitimize anything. Consequently, while the human and social sciences started to grow around the journal Année sociologique and as Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch launched Les Annales, the most influential French historical journal, French prehistorians and archaeologists were nowhere in sight.

Henri Hubert, curator at the Museum of National Antiquities, and Marcel Mauss worked together to initiate some fascinating studies of the expansion of Celtic culture. Classical archaeology, based on the French Schools in Athens and Rome, continued to develop slowly, and the abbé henri breuil offered a first synthesis of the cultural prehistory of Europe. But the only courses of study available to anyone interested in prehistory were those of the Institute of Human