Préhistoire et protohistoire en Algérie au XIXe siècle : les significations du document archéologique

Résumé En

N. Coye — Prehistory and Protohistory in 19th-Century Algeria: The Significance of Archeological Documents. By the 1850s, pre-and proto-historical research in Algeria had devel-oped. Dépendent for scientific and ideological reasons on French prehistory, this research was based on analogies between European and North African archaeological documents. Scholars who had studied the so-called Celtic monuments in Algeria intended to prove that Celts used to dwell in North Africa. After 1868, when North African megaliths were attributed to the Berbers, discourse, though shifting, was still dominated by the question of the ethnie attribution and European origins of monuments. With regard to the paleolithic period, scholars unsuccessfully tried to discover in Algeria the successive phases of development that G. de Mortillet had identified in France. During the last years of the 19th century, this failure fueled debate about synchronism, a theory based on analogies having to do with morphological similarities. In parallel to prehistorical archaeo-logy, paleoanthropology, hampered by a lack of material, worked out spéculations based on European sources and dominated by an ethnie interprétation of archae-ological and historical data. Nonetheless this research provided information for the methodological revisions wrought in this discipline at the beginning of the 20th century.