In this committed essay, archaeologist Jean-Paul Demoule, former president of the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap), professor emeritus at the University of Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne, discusses the nature of archeology . A discipline approached as “a science at the heart of the great debates of our time”.
"At the origins, archaeology", a science at the heart of the great debates of our time.
Archeology fascinates. It allows us to answer the questions of origins. That of the world, of humans as much as of societies. But since the 19 th century this function also changed, at the same time as religion and the Bible lost more and more credibility. Archaeology, which has constantly expanded its areas of research, is now constructing the past. “It is an instrument of knowledge for the study of societies, it allows an understanding of the trajectory of human history from its origins.” The margin is also sometimes narrow between the use of certain results and their political instrumentalization, according to the author Aux origins, archeology .
Science and the Future:Why this book?
Jean-Paul Demoule:I wanted to take archeology out of its “erudite” aspect, but also from a certain “treasure hunt” or “Indiana Jones” side, to show that it was the only scientific discipline that allowed to study the history of humanity over the long term and the depth of time. Only archeology can date the origin of all major shifts and the effects induced by man. The oldest texts are barely 5,000 years old, and they relate to only a small fraction of the globe:Mesopotamia, Egypt, a little later China... Most of the written records are even older. recent.
An “anarchist anthropologist”
In your opinion, what makes archeology more legitimate for explaining the distant past?
It's an old debate. For a long time, until the 1960s, archeology was defined as an auxiliary discipline of history — the truth was in the texts — and I would say, trivially, that archaeologists were seen as “punching holes” to illustrate the about historians. Medieval archeology, for example, had to fight to conquer its autonomy and explain that the Middle Ages were not only castles, cathedrals or tapestries! But things are changing. Many historians now use data from archaeological excavations to renew their approaches and analyses. Those concerning town planning, daily life, the economy, etc. I would cite, for example, the case of Bruno Dumézil with the High Middle Ages and the so-called barbarian worlds. In France, preventive archaeology, which corresponds to 95% of the excavations carried out on the territory, has been able to demonstrate, concerning these periods, that it was not at all the generalized catastrophe of the "dark ages", so long developed in our national romance.
This book reflects the major themes that you have been developing for several years on inequalities, voluntary servitude or the manipulation of the past in the service of the present. Would you be like the American David Graeber or the British David Wengrow an “anarchist anthropologist”?
It is true that I feel quite close to them. Even if my natural filiation is more related to the French anthropologist and ethnologist Pierre Clastres (1934-1977). The logic of human history is not the constitution of increasingly statist, imperial and unequal societies. What traditional human societies have tried to do is to limit the rise of power. Inequality has never been a fatality of human nature. When you look at the long term, there are times of great concentrations of power - like the period of the imposing megalithic tombs on the shores of the Atlantic more than 6,000 years ago, or even the Celtic princely residences twenty-five centuries ago — all systematically followed by collapses. Our territory bears the traces of all these events. A pattern that can be observed all over the planet, if we take region by region. What interests me is the expression of these phenomena of resistance to power. There is a social demand for history and archaeology, a demand for understanding the world as it is and as it often seems to lack meaning, if not hope. This is what my thinking is about. The one developed in this book, which strives to show that it is not too late to be optimistic.
"At the origins, Archeology", A science at the heart of the great debates of our time.
Editions La Découverte, 234p, December 2019, €19.90