« We dig, it’s your story »: this slogan is boldly displayed on many palisades protecting the archaeological sites of the
National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap). In town as in the countryside, the collaboration between planners, town planners and archaeologists has been deployed on the territory since in 1995, the
Malta European Convention laid down the foundations of the legal protection of heritage. It is a plural history of France which is now revealed as far back as the story of men can write, by unearthing the archives of the soil.
A frail left arm
One of the preambles to this long story is a frail left arm, that of the young Neanderthal, 200,000 years old, recently unearthed in Seine-Maritime. He is our founding vestige. A few thousand generations later, from an unequally documented chronology, the silhouette of a plump woman emerged in the Somme, hastily sketched in limestone 23,000 years before our era. They are, “in real life” as in image, the first anchors of a shared history, well before the improperly revisited reading of a royal Merovingian baptism: these old “ancestors” give the impetus and sign the amplitude of a common storytelling.
The bones of the left arm of a pre-Neanderthal, dated 200,000 years, found on the site of Tourville-la-Rivière, in Seine-Maritime, next to a modern arm © Denis Gliksman / Inrap (via The Conversation)
Each parcel of land diagnosed, each hectare excavated, each ancient human studied, in the most intimate of his bones as in his behavior, is the link, prestigious or very modest, of this long chain of stories, of the great as of the anecdotal, which manufactures as it reveals it, the frame of a living memory. On the strength of its achievements, a few assumptions as well as its certainties, preventive archeology invites itself to the table of contemporary debates, to better deconstruct the pitfall of shortcuts, and to relate the multi-millennial framework, freed from all propaganda, of a territory in perpetual motion. The tempo of men and women, know-how and ideas.
Large population movements, singular routes and a few invasions have shaped a land with fluctuating contours. Much more than the habitats, each of the dead punctuated the landscapes by impregnating their attachment to the soil: thus the “monumentalized” commemoration of the Prince of Lavau, in Aube, in the 5th century BC, claims the immutable ostentation of the elites when the hasty and stripped tombs of slaves, Gallo-Romans or Ultramarines in the 18th century, reinforce the invisibility of the poor. The erasure of the vulnerable and the gradeless.
The Prince of Lavau, lying on his chariot, was accompanied by a rich deposit of Mediterranean crockery © Denis Gliksman / Inrap (via The Conversation)
Telling about the bonds woven between humans
Data from the earth is unstoppable and unfiltered. Material and often fragmented, they also know how to relate the links woven between humans; they reveal acceptance, care and sharing. Solidarity, sometimes! Without artifice, they unfold the adventure of the humble and the poorly off. Those we have forgotten, eliminated, even erased from the story. Their reading makes sense with our contemporary debates, with the questions of a century with inclusive and benevolent ambitions.
This archeology tells the story of the endless and invisible cohort of cripples, cripples, destitute and beggars, whose vulnerability or handicap made them so dependent and whom their loved ones cared for, with the dignity of The compensation. In the 3rd century BC, an old Gauloise benefited from fittings, an ingenious system of support and transport, made of metal, leather and stuffed with comfortable straw. Mutual aid, rudimentary but effective, validates here the idea of ancestral “care”, hoped for by philosophers and sociologists. Solidarity is deployed for the benefit of the non-autonomous. Societal research is gradually emerging.
This archeology questions the social inequalities of that time before, not so long ago, when depending on whether one was rich or destitute, the consecrated earth did not always bury the dead in an equal eternity. Thus on the burial places of the parishioners of the Jacobins convent, in Rennes, between the 15th and 18th centuries, the ecclesiastical authorities inventoried and dispersed the dead according to their socio-economic status: to the poorest the cemetery stripped of hospitals, to the richest the hushed splendor of church floors.
Sharing the same land
For the Middle Ages, this archeology even identifies, with aplomb, the very ancient presence of “others”, the members of these cultural and religious communities, certainly minorities, who shared, with as much serenity as noise, the same land of reception. Nothing is enough, sometimes, like these three burials of the VIIIth century, in the suburbs of Nîmes, not obeying the liturgical recommendations in force. The rite, here discordant, is widely deployed elsewhere, in the Iberian Peninsula, in Sicily or in the Maghreb. The analysis of their DNA traces the North African origin, probably Berber, of these “foreigners” sheltered in a mixed cemetery and that celebrants were able to bury according to their own mortuary rites. In the midst of Christian tombs. Often demonized or made invisible, the Muslim presence, so tenuous in written sources, thus asserts itself with force. A new chapter, a non-negotiable link in the collective factory.
One of the three 7th century Muslim tombs unearthed in Nîmes. The position of the body, the head oriented towards Mecca and the direct deposit in a pit are characteristics evoking Muslim funerary practices © Patrice Pliskine / Inrap (via The Conversation)
This archeology of otherness also contextualizes the ancient settlement of Jews in France, their often peaceful life with Christians, inscribed even in the juxtaposition of places of worship and places of life. The Hebrew inscriptions of a monument in Rouen in the 12th century, the mikveh (ritual bath) in Montpellier in the 13th century or the Jewish cemetery in Châteauroux in the 12th-14th centuries are all hyphens, peaceful episodes, patiently founded on the complexity of common origins that the tragedy of the royal expulsions of the 12th, 14th and 16th centuries damaged.
Dug in a limestone substrate, these tombs of the Jewish cemetery of Châteauroux date from the XIᵉ-XIVᵉ centuries © Philippe Blanchard / Inrap (via The Conversation)
Sometimes you don’t need to study a skeleton to celebrate the living. A small copper container, patched up many times, upsets and revolts: it is the fierce will, the survival instinct of abandoned Malagasy slaves, all the shame drunk by the crew of a French East India Company boat on the islet of Tromelin, in the Indian Ocean, at the end of the 18th century, which springs up. Without the deceptive cosmetics of official concealment.
The materiality of archeology assumes the great facts and reveals the small gestures. Dignified impulses like the worst compromises. It restores the authenticity of the relationship to the other. It is often said that the archaeologist leafs through a book from which he tears out the pages as soon as he has read it. It is an open-air encyclopedia, without subjectivity or cultural appropriation, which knows how to circumvent the nauseous traps of instrumentalization to speak to each one of us, about each one of us. Of our diversities, our gray areas, our vulnerabilities and our differences. This book with moving pages conceals no chapter, no neglected paragraph and transmits the data in the crudity of a half-forgetting.
Copper vessel made on the island of Tromelin by the castaways after the departure of the French on September 27, 1761. It bears many riveted repairs. Max Guérout / GRAN (via The Conversation)
Archaeology, tirelessly practiced on the territory, thanks to heritage laws and the commitment of researchers, builds a France, never shriveled, which connects each man and each woman, wherever they come from, whatever they do and think, by taking a thousand and one detours, to the so distant left arm of the young Neanderthal from Normandy.
This analysis was written by Valérie Delattre, archaeo-anthropologist at the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) and at the University of Burgundy Franche-Comté (UBFC) and Dominique Garcia, professor of archeology at Aix-Marseille University and President of INRAP.
The original article was published on the site of The Conversation.
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