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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
In November 1954 the French Prehistoric Society celebrated its fiftieth jubilee with a séance solennelle extraordinaire in the cinema of the Musée de L'Homme in Paris. The séance was presided over by the Abbé Breuil, doyen of French if not of all European prehistorians, and attended by most French prehistoric archaeologists of importance. Guy Gaudron, the Secretary General of the Society, gave a brief history of the society's inception and development; the Abbé Breuil spoke on ‘La Perspective préhistorique et ses progrés’; messages of congratulation were sent to the Ćount Henri Begouen, who, with Gaudron, were made Honorary Presidents; messages were read from prehistorians and prehistoric organizations in other countries, and a small group of foreign representatives spoke in person—Sauter from Geneva, Kühn from Mainz, Frank Mitchell from Dublin, and Lacaille and myself from Great Britain.
1 See Bull. Soc. Préh. Française, 1954, 497 ff.
2 L’Anthropologie, LVII (1954), 401-43, and LVIII, 1-28.
3 ANTIQUITY, 1955, 64.
4 ANTIQUITY, 1932, 55.
5 L’Anthropologie, 1932, 658.
6 ANTIQUITY, 1950, 166.
7 See, for example vols. 49, 445-6, 50, 287-291, and 58, 564.
8 Bull. Soc. Préh. Française, 1954, 56.
9 Archaeology from the Field (1953), 208. Cf. Said and Done (1955), 301 and this sentence, ‘The state of French archaeology is the greatest hindrance to the progress of knowledge in the sphere of European (and British) prehistory’.
10 It also was published by Picard, in 1952.
11 Not that the French themselves are consistent in their use of préhistoire and protohistoire. See the Paris volume (1935) of the Congrès Archéologique de France.
12 I refer to Lantier’s La Vie Préhistorique (1952) and Thevenot’s Les Gallo-Romains (1948). Cf. in the same series Georges Daux’s Les Etapes de l’Archéologie (1942) with its great emphasis on classical archaeology.
13 We see the same division of interest and neglect of protohistoire in the recently published Larousse Histoire de France. Leroi-Gourhan’s chapter entitled ‘La Préhistoire’ goes from the beginning to L’Age du Bronze but the greater part of it deals with pre-Chassey times. The next chapter is ‘La Gaule Celtique et Romaine’, but only two pages are devoted to pre-Roman Gaul. Here, too, in this most modern synthesis of French history, the formative Neolithic, Bronze and Early Iron Ages have fallen between the two stools of the Old Stone Age and Rome.
14 Our own record in the British Museum since the war is a sad one, as discerning Frenchmen often point out. Lack of money is making our national Museum compare very unfavourably with, say, that at Copenhagen.
15 Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1955.
16 I refer to Nougier at Toulouse, Malvesin-Fabre at Bordeaux and Hatt at Strasbourg, but I am fully aware that Hatt is Professor of more than prehistory ; he, like the Museum at St. Germain-en-Laye is concerned with Antiquités Nationales. Perhaps we in Britain might begin to have Professorships of our National Antiquities ?
