‘Archaeology is but Ethnology in the past tense’. Theoretical Proofs and Intellectual Technologies in André Leroi-Gourhan’s Archived Archéologie du Pacifique-Nord, 1946

Abstract

The brief foray proposed here into the archives of French ethnologist, technologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) focusses on the proof-correcting process of the very last page of his doctoral thesis, published in 1946. The changing state of these proofs and the additions he penned to them, as made perceptible in the illustrations provided, serves me to highlight three interconnected aspects of history-of-archaeology investigations: the interest of archives-based biographical studies, the links between the history and the theory of archaeology, and, last but not least, the material and ‘intellectual technologies’ involved in the production of knowledge