A forgotten revolution revealed by four major exhibitions in France
All periods of history are not dreaming. The Bronze Age, which stretches over fifteen centuries in Europe (from 2,300 to 800 BC), thus evokes neither Haut-Lieu, nor famous character. “However,” points out the archaeologist Pierre-Yves Milcent, it was the time of Ulysses, marked by the appearance of professional weapons. The wars now seem to be carried out by lords, like those that we tell us the iliad .
Products – and therefore men who trade it – travel very far, as in Odyssey . “These epics transcribed shortly after the end of this period, around 700 BC, explain the title of the exhibition chosen by the Anne-de-Beaujeu de Moulins (Allier) museum:” The Bronze Odyssey “.
It is a technical aspect which is highlighted in the title of another exhibition, at the Museum of National Archeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines): “The masters of fire”. “The Bronze Age is the moment when for the first time men make a metal alloy,” said Rolande Simon-Millot, one of the commissioners. In copper, which they used to work, they add 10 % of tin, which gives it a brilliant appearance like gold, and above all a solidity which allows it to transform it into weapons, tools, but also finely worked jewelry … In addition, we can, for the first time in history, produce in series thanks to mussels. A real technological revolution that is accompanied by a taste for ostentatious luxury! »»
A Written World
Commercial circuits transport these two metals by road or boat – whose mines are distant from each other – towards bronze production centers, where craftsmen will be able to produce it and give it shape. In Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the replica of a ship found in the Channel is presented in the courtyard; In Moulins, two windows emphasize the domestication of the horse and the invention of the ray wheel: means of transport essential to this first “globalization” of exchanges, in a European world which still remains without writing.
Until the last thirty years, this period has been mainly studied from bronze “treasures”, discovered without archaeological context. One of them, found in Alésia, had been attributed to the Gauls living eight centuries later. “So much so that Vercingétorix is mostly represented with a helmet, a breastplate and extremely old -fashioned weapons! »Had amuses Pierre-Yves Milcent, who deplores, however, that this cliché still persists.
Preventive excavations
But things change thanks to the multiplication of preventive excavations and the progress of scientific analyzes of the material found. The two exhibitions return to the exceptional discovery in 2017, in Jenzat (Allier), a very important 25 ha housing site. He delivered eighteen “deposits” of objects carefully stacked in vases buried near a long embankment, shortly before the inhabitants leave the premises. “This process and this number evoke votive gestures, religious offerings where we sacrifice the most beautiful bracelets, the axes, the precious knives to a deity,” says Pierre-Yves Milcent, who directs the excavation for the University of Toulouse.
While in Moulins we will insist on the practice of these deposits and their rediscovery, in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the commissioners present the whole of the Bronze Age society, with also non-metallic objects (wood, bone, cereals …) from excavations of homes. In the two museums, the educational scenography succeeds in making us closer these women and these men who are just out of oblivion.
