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notion of technicity incited him to articulate the philosophical, genetic, and epistemological investigations that he was to develop in such a prophetic fashion in Le geste et la parole (Word and Action; 1964–1965). In this work, Leroi-Gourhan developed his ideas about exteriorization and “ethnic becoming” (épiphylogenèse), which he saw as the progressive liberation of a memory that articulates three levels: individual, socioethnic, and specific. The idea that a kind of rationality plays its part in the course of history has, moreover, invited a comparison between Leroi-Gourhan’s work and that of Karl Marx.

If his career was that of an academic (he was professor at the University of Lyon until 1956, at the Sorbonne until 1968, and finally at the College de France until 1982), he lived, above all else, as a philosopher, and he was an astonishing character. When most of his colleagues regarded excavation as being of secondary importance, he took his students into the field. In this context, the excavations at the sites of Arcy-sur-Cure, Les Mournouards, and pincevent were of great importance. During three decades, several hundred students from many countries took courses in excavation at these centers, and they were deeply influenced by the experience. Here, Leroi-Gourhan laid the foundations of both spatial analysis and funerary archaeology à la française.

In the 1960s, Leroi-Gourhan’s approach seemed on the point of imposing itself on the archaeological sphere, but this was not to be. Three factors contributed to this missed opportunity. First was Leroi-Gourhan’s personality: he was a man who had accumulated degrees and honors; a man who could read Chinese, sing in Russian, and speak Japanese; a man who had reorganized museums and updated methods of excavation and the interpretation of prehistoric art; a man who predicted, in 1965, the advent of hypertexts and electronic libraries. At the same time, however, as an archaeologist he had made no spectacular discoveries. He was a thinker who found it hard to communicate, a keen do-it-yourself man who worked without funds, and a professor who did not leave a single distinguished student behind.

The second factor involved a change of direction in his intellectual development, which had lasting consequences. After the publication of Le geste et la parole and the discovery of the Magdalenian site at Pincevent in 1964, Leroi-Gourhan abruptly lost interest in the synthetic approach that he had developed until then; the often intuitive yet profoundly lucid, coherent, and penetrating predictions and interpretations he expressed in Le geste et la parole were for him an end in their own right. It was as if, after Pincevent, the structuring of prehistoric space became the locus of his activities. This bifurcation brought him the disapproval of English and American scholars who generally only knew of him from a few translated texts, essentially texts on Paleolithic art (Le geste et la parole did not appear in English until 1993). The third factor consisted of the institutional gap between ethnology and archaeology, a gap that thwarted all attempts by his followers who tried to maintain the unity of prehistory and ethnology that Leroi-Gourhan had believed in. Not one of his students was both an archaeologist and an ethnologist, all of them were either one or the other.

Leroi-Gourhan’s experience resembles that of Lévi-Strauss in that the history of a discipline can be identified with the intellectual history of an exceptional personality. But unlike Lévi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan’s paradoxical nature has contributed to the situation today, in which he is ignored by a large non-French part of the scientific community. But, as he had intended, the implications of his work go far beyond the archaeology and the ethnology of techniques. His general hypotheses concerning the process of hominization, which raise the question of Being, are today being placed into a wider philosophical perspective. His analysis of post-Neanderthal “epiphylogenesis” has been repositioned in the context of the cognitive sciences and is the origin of highly up-to-date investigations in other disciplines.

Anick Coudart