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also argued that these North African remains were similar to the bones found at the site of Choukoutien (now Zhoukoudian) in China, and, indeed, these mandibles, and those from Zhoukoudianzhen are now recognized as belonging to Homo erectus.
Arambourg also excavated the cave of Tamar Hat in Algeria. The only Ibero-maurusian sequence excavated to bedrock, it has been dated at ca. 20,600 b.p. The cave was used as a camp for hunting Barbary sheep, and its three meters of deposit indicated that it had been used and reused by people for nearly 5,000 years.
Arambourg was seventy when he retired from the museum, but he remained actively involved in research until his death. Between 1967 and 1969, he led the French team of the International Palaeontological Research Expedition to the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, and during the first field season, Arambourg and his colleague Yves Coppens found an Austalopithecine mandible. The Omo research expedition was a complex paleoanthropological project, and its results became a keystone in understanding the chronology of African prehistory.
Arambourg’s monograph on North African vertebrate paleontology was published posthumously in two parts in 1970 and 1979. He was president of the Societé Geologique de France and the Societé Prehistorique Francaise, he received the Gaudry Prize in 1959, and he was elected to the Academie des Sciences in 1961.
See also
The concepts of antiquities, monuments, and heritage are relatively recent innovations. An awareness of the special qualities of structures and artifacts produced by earlier peoples and generations developed slowly and sporadically over a long period in various parts of the world. The deliberate collection of artifacts from earlier periods was observed in china during the Han dynasty in the first century b.c. (Schnapp 1993), and there were conscious efforts by Roman emperors, notably Hadrian (a.d. 117– 138), to protect and conserve notable structures from past epochs, such as dynastic Egypt and classical greece. It is arguable, however, whether such activities can be interpreted as conscious attempts at heritage management. In both cases, collectors may well have been motivated by a mixture of religious, philosophical, political, and aesthetic objectives.
The systematic study of relics from the past and deliberate actions designed to ensure their conservation may be deemed (in Europe at least) to have begun with the Renaissance and the reintroduction of the values of classical antiquity. Rome was where the values encapsulated in the remains of its imperial past were first identified and where conscious efforts were made to conserve them starting in the latter part of the fifteenth century. The artist Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520) was instructed by Pope Leo X in 1515 to carry out a survey of the monuments of the city of Rome (Jokilehto 1999, 32 ff.) and was given the resounding title of “prefect of marbles and stones.” In a report produced four years later, Raphael set out in meticulous detail the requirements of such a survey, which was carried out by other papal functionaries. From this time onward, the buildings of imperial Rome and the marble statuary and facings that decorated them no longer served solely as a quarry for bedecking palaces and churches (or, worse, as a source of materials for lime kilns).
Meanwhile, in northern Europe, a second movement was developing that was to lay the foundations of modern heritage management. The systematic study and recording of antiquities, both portable and monumental, diffused northward through the work of French antiquaries such as Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580–1637). As such work moved into lands that had been little, if at all, influenced by Roman culture, the quest for information shifted to the landscape—in particular, the many field monuments such as earthworks and stone settings—that were still to be found in profusion at that time. Attention was also directed toward early buildings such as castles, monasteries, and churches whose origins owed nothing to classical models. In England, John Leland (1506?– 1552) was appointed to the post of king’s antiquary by Henry VIII in 1533, and his peregrinations
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