formal approach was much more difficult to put into practice than François Bordes’s synthetic lists, and its criteria were not relevant to the questions that could now be addressed by analyzing the technologies of prehistoric tools.

For most people, the problems were intellectual, institutional, and financial; for others, the stumbling block was conceptual. Those who tried to echo the discussions about the “new archaeology” (Cleuziou et al. 1980; Schnapp 1980) were obliged to begin with the fundamentals, which meant becoming directly involved in the reform of institutions. This commitment was all the more necessary because archaeology was disastrously lacking in resources. The journal Nouvelles de l’Archéologie, launched in 1979, was a particularly effective weapon in this regard. A similar strategy, though less political, if not actually apolitical, was adopted by Gardin, who was the main architect of what he saw as a general reorganization of archaeology in France with the creation of a national archaeological institute, the Centre de Recherches Archéologiques. Thus it was that some members of the younger generation of the time, imbued with the utopian visions of 1968 and exceptionally united, tried—first via a systematic survey of the resources of French archaeology—to make the decision-makers fully aware of the discipline’s chronic lack of funding (Normand and Richard 1974; Chapelot et al. 1979). This group worked tirelessly for more than twenty years to reshape university teaching, to create a unified discipline, to define policies for research, and to get funds earmarked, but also to adapt the techniques and strategies of excavation to the realities on the ground and the academic issues involved.

Consequently contacts with the inspiring new ideas of the “new archaeology” were real but anecdotal and personal. A notable exception was the debate between François Bordes and lewis binford on the meaning of the different Mousterian faciès, which the former interpreted in terms of different cultures whereas the latter saw them as reflecting different functions. Ironically, the more “conservative” position (that of Bordes) was probably the more relevant. Thanks to the interest of American scholars in the Perigord, Bordes’s work was soon translated and became popular in the United States, as he did himself. By contrast, the studies of Leroi-Gourhan (which should have generated even more interest) remained unknown to the English-speaking public until the1990s.

The Special Characteristics of French Archaeology in Its Early Phases

It is noteworthy that archaeology played only a tiny role in the Annales school of history, in spite of the efforts of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel’s interest in “material civilization.” Prehistory and “new history” came into contact only rarely (Brun 1987), and then with regard to material culture (Coudart and Pion 1986). It is true that Annales was the victim of its own success. Swept along by the growth of publishing and the media and affected by the European disenchantment with the models of economism and Marxism, the journal ultimately switched its focus to the history of mentalités, of cultural areas and “micro-history” rather than history over long periods (de la longue durée). Nevertheless, the studies undertaken by the Center for Historical Research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) helped to develop the history of deserted villages and the social investigation of the rural world in the Middle Ages. It was a medieval historian and an archaeologist, then teaching at the EHESS, who produced the fullest survey of the medieval village (Chapelot and Fossier 1980). Today, other fields are proving equally fruitful. Excavations and work on the Bronze and Iron Ages are shedding new light on the role and situation of the Bronze Age and Celtic inhabitants of the temperate regions of Europe. The archaeology of Western Europe now faces vast ethnic and historical questions that so far have barely been addressed.

As for the school of Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, which brings together history, the history of religions, and anthropology, the focus there has been on framing questions of social and economic history and examining the role of images in ancient Greece (Vernant and Bérard 1984; Durand 1986; Schnapp 1993). This approach—the result of combining a