structuralist analysis of the Greek tradition with an analysis of iconography—has been highly revealing and has helped to demonstrate the need for an hermeneutics of archaeology. This kind of history should now be deriving new material from the excavations in urban areas that have been under way in France since the 1980s. These major sites (the most famous is at the Louvre) are totally transforming the knowledge of daily life in medieval and postmedieval cities.

The French have also developed particular expertise in the specialized field of technological culture. This tradition arose from the conjunction of three things. The first is ethnology proper, starting with the work of pioneers such as André-Georges Haudricourt and André Leroi-Gourhan, who were followed by Charles Parain, Bertrand Gille, Robert Cresswell, François Sigaut, and most recently Pierre Lemonnier. Second is Leroi-Gourhan’s ethnological approach to the study of prehistory. Last are the experiments in the technology of stone tools conducted by Jacques Tixier and the team he established. The anthropological study of technologies and technical systems, which has been particularly strong and is well illustrated by the group producing the journal Techniques et culture, is at present of greater interest to archaeologists than to ethnologists. The former are hoping that it will yield theories about the relationship between artifact and cognition, between material culture and society. But it is above all in the field of stone tools that archaeological experimentation in France has developed a wide range of resources—instruments for observing and monitoring movements of lithic raw materials (Tixier et al. 1980, 1984), “chaînes opératoires” (operating sequences) for producing tools, theories on the technical and cognitive capacities of Homo erectus, etc. Technology was therefore the direction taken by what may be called the “ethno-archaeological strategy” in the 1980s (Pétrequin 1984; Pétrequin and Pétrequin 1984). But the use made of ethnology has been both prudent and highly empirical, whether with regard to vernacular architecture in the Middle East, pottery-making in India, the dynamics of lake-settlements in Bénin, processing skins in western North America, the lifestyles of Arctic peoples, or tool-making in New Guinea. This research taken as a whole has, however, yielded a substantial quantity of data and fresh ideas.

At the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century: Every Reason for Optimism

Only with the creation in 1979 by Fernand Braudel’s Maison des Sciences de l’Homme of the journal Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie, an academic journal also concerned with policies and information, did conceptual thinking about archaeology acquire coherence in France. At the same time, as we saw earlier, rescue archaeology was radically overhauled—a development that the editors of the journal were to follow and sustain with interest. The idea of an excavation plan became indispensable in the context of the large-scale rescue operations, and at the same time it led to the development of practical thinking about prospecting, sampling, and quantitative methods. Salvage excavations and regional programs to support them and bring together all available methods were put into place, and proved effective in the Aisne valley in Picardy and on Lakes Clairvaux and Chalain in the Jura. Nevertheless it took the revolt of the archaeologists in 1998 (the third of its kind since 1989) and the appointment of Catherine Trautmann as minister of culture for this growth at last to be restructured through reform, law, and the creation of a public body responsible for excavation and research that would look after rescue archaeology, and indeed archaeology in general (Les Nouvelles de l’Archéologie 1999–2000, 73–79).

As is clear from the catalogue for the 1989 Paris exhibition (Mohen 1989), and in spite of the work of people like Jacques Cauvin (1994) or the 30- and 40-year-olds who received less media coverage, French archaeology in the 1990s was still committing the same sins as before. Thus most archaeologists continued to be skeptical about building social and cultural models, following in the tradition of people like Bordes, Leroi-Gourhan (his position in the 1970s and 1980s, at least), Courbin, Gardin, and some others. This skepticism led them to deal in notions that are all the more dangerous because they are not stated explicitly. For instance, the arsenal of techniques drawn from the natural sciences has often given rise to oversimplified determinist environmental models. At the same time, the appearance from time to time of British or North American scholars in France has encouraged the development of antidiffusionist approaches—frequently based on an excessive use of radiocarbon dating, with its imprecise measurements that can give a false impression that objects are contemporary—that do not always appear to fit the facts. Similarly, certain postprocessual works have been read by people without enough background and this has led to ahistorical interpretations at variance with the facts or lacking in any determinism. By contrast, in a completely different field, diffusionism has been much used in France by a group of extreme right-wing intellectuals, “the New Right,” in order to account for the Indo-Europeans and to demonstrate the superiority of European civilization. In passing, it should be pointed out that archaeology alone certainly would not provide a simple answer to this intriguing question; rather, the solution would require the close collaboration of archaeologists, linguists, and experts on ethnology and myth to produce new theoretical models (Demoule 1980, 1999).