Littérature scientifique sur le sujet « Archives nationales (France). Musée sigillographique »

Pendant cinq décennies Claudie Marcel-Dubois et Maguy Andral, figures incontournables de l’ethnomusicologie au Musée des Arts et Traditions populaires, collectent un matériel d’étude d’une grande richesse et d’une grande diversité, abordant les pratiques musicales, la facture et l’organologie sur la presque totalité du territoire métropolitain français et dans certaines terres d’outre-mer. À la veille de redéployer ses collections à Marseille, le Musée des Arts et Traditions populaires (devenu MuCEM en 2005) lance une vaste opération de sauvegarde des archives. L’article apporte un éclairage particulier sur les archives ethnomusicologiques qui tiennent, dans cet ensemble, une place éminente. Dans le cadre d’un partenariat entre les Archives nationales, une équipe du IIAC (laboratoire d’anthropologie CNRS-EHESS) et MuCEM, la numérisation des archives écrites, des photographies et des enregistrements sonores, est en voie d’achèvement, prochainement accessibles sur Internet. L’éventail des possibilités d’interrogation et d’exploitation qu’ouvrira la dématérialisation d’un fonds sans équivalent pour l’ethnomusicologie en France est très vaste.

Objectives Our knowledge of the social structure of pre-historic peoples is limited by the scant physical record, largely limited to archeological fragments of biological materials, tools, and funereal art. The Natufian, who lived near present day Jerusalem around 9000 BCE, was a culture first identified by Dorothy Garrod, a British paleo-archeologist. The Natufian produced what may be the world’s first expression of sexuality in art in the Ain-Sakhri statue, depicting two figures intertwined in a coital embrace. Our aim was to better illustrate Garrod’s seminal work, and the significance of the Ain Sakhri statue in our understanding of pre-historical concepts of sexual self-awareness. Methods Archives of the British Museum (London), the Pitts River Museum and the Dorothy Garrod Photographic Archive (Oxford), the Mathurin collection at the Musée des Antiquités Nationales (St Germain-en-Laye, France), and digital. humanities.ox.ac.uk were consulted to identify biographical information on Dorothy Garrod and her archeological work. Secondary sources on the Natufian peoples and their art were identified through PubMed, digital archive sources, and the Garrod archives as cited. Results Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968) was a prolific early 20th century scientist in paleo archeology and a pioneer for women in a male-dominated field, the first prehistorian, and first woman, to be elected to a professorship at Cambridge University (19391952). She established comprehensive excavations in the Levant in the Middle East on Mount Carmel near Jerusalem where she identified the ancient Natufian cultures. There, her mentor, AH Breuil, had found a 10 cm stone figure, now known as the ‘Ain Sakhri’ figurine, from 9,000 BCE and identified by him to be a product of Garrod’s Natufian culture. Unlike other contemporary Natufian sculptures found in the Wadi Khareitoun region, which were worked in bone or antler, the Ain Sakhri was chiseled from calcite. The Ain Sakhri, depicting two intertwined figures and with a phallic shape, is regarded as the world’s oldest known sculpture of people making love. Conclusions Dorothy Garrod was a ground-breaking pioneer in paleo archeology and the 1st female professor at Cambridge from 1939-1952. Her early 20th century work on the Natufian people revealed a complex, sophisticated pre-historic culture which produced the Ain Sakhri, the first sculpted depiction of coitus, predating the historical record of sexual self-awareness by thousands of years.

The archive is both an object and a practice where history and memory converge. Yet this French site of memory is also defined by what it leaves out, i.e. the colonial past. This article examines two sites – that is, two forms and practices of document conservation and management along with their public and didactic uses – that define the postcolonial context in France. The first is represented by former colonial archives (Musée national de l’histoire de l’immigration; Archives nationales d’outre-mer) whose relocation and renaming reflects public attitudes and state policies of obfuscation rather than disclosure of the colonial past. The second site is literature (novels by Condé, Monénembo, Chamoiseau and Sebbar), which operates as an intermediate space between memory and history and a realm of living memory that assumes the responsibility of remembering by fulfilling the three tasks incumbent upon the archival institution: managing public recollections, salvaging private memories, as well as conserving, selecting, organizing, and transmitting unrecorded or unacknowledged phenomena and events for social, political, and cultural purposes. The article also considers the lacunae in metropolitan literary history that constitutes, in the post-Lansonian French culture, a nation-building archival genre.