a conservator at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1868. There, he drew up the classification of stone-tool technology whose denominations have remained standard until the present day; this work represents his major contribution to the science of prehistory in the nineteenth century. Mortillet argued against édouard lartet’s classification of Paleolithic material based on faunal assemblages and argued for classification based on stone-tool types.

From 1880 onward Mortillet was one of the prime movers of a group of scientists, mostly anthropologists, who called themselves “scientific materialists,” and between 1884 and 1887 he founded and ran the review L’Homme, in which their arguments and positions were promulgated. Mortillet became anticlerical and denounced the Catholic Church for its interpretations of scientific data, arguing for the separation of science and religion that became a political struggle for the separation of church and state. After 1870 and the defeat of France by the Prussians, his arguments took on a nationalist tone.

Mortillet also participated in the debate over the existence of an intelligent human ancestor in the Tertiary period, provoked by the discovery of incised bones and apparently worked flints in Tertiary soils. Some prehistorians, such as jean louis armand de quatrefages, argued for an intelligent human being created by God in the beginning. Mortillet, faithful to his concept of evolution, deduced from the flints the existence of a transitional creature between man and ape—the missing link, which he called anthropopithecus and to whom he devoted many pages in his book Le préhistorique (1883). His creation was replaced by eugene dubois’s Pithecanthropus erectus, discovered in Java in 1894, which destroyed the concept of evolution promulagated by Mortillet, suggesting that the transformation of species was neither as linear nor as simple as the French prehistorian had thought.

Mortillet’s philosophical beliefs also had a strong impact on the debate about prehistoric art and religion. He was certain that Paleolithic peoples were primitive and, as savages, on a lower rung of the ladder of biological and cultural development, far removed from modern people. However, discoveries of art objects, funeral practices, and cave-art galleries inevitably raised a few problems for a priori ideas about primitive beings. Mortillet refused to see any symbolic value in Paleolithic art and denied the existence of anything abstract. Eventually, as the evidence accumulated, Paleolithic art was recognized by other prehistorians such as emile cartailhac, breaking down the equation of the primitive with the barbarian.

In key academic positions for half a century, Mortillet was both a great theoretician and the leader of a school. A controlling influence, he helped to train, through his writing and teaching, a large proportion of the French prehistorians of the second generation and significantly assisted in establishing the discipline of prehistory in France.

Nathalie Richard; translated by Judith Braid

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 1, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), pp. 106–107.

Most na Soči

Most na Soči, also known as Sveta Lucija or Santa Lucia, is an early–Iron Age site in the subalpine area of western slovenia at the confluence of the rivers Soča (Isonzo), Idrijca, and Baca. The cemetery was extensively excavated between 1884 and 1902 by Carlo Marchesetti, the curator of the Trieste City Museum, and by Joseph Szombathy, the curator of the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna.

More than 6,400 graves were discovered during the excavations, making Most na Soči one of the largest prehistoric cemeteries in this part of Europe. The burial rite was almost exclusively cremation in a flat grave; only 10 percent of the cremation graves were deposited in urns. Grave goods comprised personal ornaments (fibulae, pins, bracelets, pendants, necklaces, etc.).

The cemetery is divided chronologically into six phases between the eighth and fourth centuries b.c. Weapons (spearheads and axes) were absent throughout most of this period, only appearing in the last phase, i.e., in the fourth century.