Provenance of Some Merovingian-Era Buckles at the University of Missouri

"Among the thousands of objects in the collection of the Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Missouri is a little-known group of early medieval artifacts from France. Given by the artist Evelyn Borchard Metzger in 1962, the European objects include a silver gilt bronze brooch, twenty bronze and iron buckles, and a decorated bronze buckle. They represented part of a larger gift of pieces from Mrs. Metzger to the museum, which included art from ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru. Among the early medieval artifacts, the group of twenty buckles is notable because of the preservation of valuable information about their original provenance in northern France from early twentieth-century excavations of three Merovingian-era cemeteries at Dury-Saint-Claude, Bury, and La Neuvil-leroy (de?partement Oise, France). Previously unpublished, the buckles constitute one of the largest collections in the United States of early medieval artifacts with known find spots, and thus they merit further attention."--First paragraph.Includes bibliographical reference

Berber genealogy and the politics of prehistoric archaeology and craniology in French Algeria (1860s–1880s)

Following the conquest of Algiers and its surrounding territory by the French army in 1830, officers noted an abundance of standing stones in this region of North Africa. Although they attracted considerably less attention among their cohort than more familiar Roman monuments such as triumphal arches and bridges, these prehistoric remains were similar to formations found in Brittany and other parts of France. The first effort to document these remains occurred in 1863, when Laurent-Charles Féraud, a French army interpreter, recorded thousands of dolmens and stone formations south-west of Constantine. Alleging that these constructions were Gallic, Féraud hypothesized the close affinity of the French, who claimed descent from the ancient Gauls, with the early inhabitants of North Africa. After Féraud's claims met with scepticism among many prehistorians, French scholars argued that these remains were constructed by the ancestors of the Berbers (Kabyles in contemporary parlance), whom they hypothesized had been dominated by a blond race of European origin. Using craniometric statistics of human remains found in the vicinity of the standing stones to propose a genealogy of the Kabyles, French administrators in Algeria thereafter suggested that their mixed origins allowed them to adapt more easily than the Arab population to French colonial governance. This case study at the intersection of prehistoric archaeology, ancient history and craniology exposes how genealogical (and racial) classification made signal contributions to French colonial ideology and policy between the 1860s and 1880s

Séjour de longue durée au CESCM pour un couple de chercheurs finlandais

Marika Rasanen et Teemu Immonen sont Finlandais. Ils nous viennent de l’Université de Turku et sont en séjour de recherche au CESCM pour 18 mois, sur invitation d'Éric Palazzo. Cliché J.-P. Brouard (CESCM) Marika, Teemu, could you please tell us about your teaching and research activities? Teemu: My background is in the study of late medieval monastic history and the cult of saints. More recently, I have concentrated on the Golden Age of Monte Cassino under Abbot Desiderius (d. 1087) and the..