Séverine Hurard is an archaeologist at the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap), a specialist in modern periods (from the 16e in the XVIIIe centuries) and contemporary (since the industrial revolution).
Why are the preventive excavations carried out in France more and more interested in the periods on which you are working?
The archeology of the modern and contemporary world is not entirely new since it developed in the 1970s, but it is true that, for a decade, we have witnessed a real diversification of the fields of research, which extend to the most recent periods. There is an affirmation of archeology in bearing witness to the social practices of these periods and in comparing them with other types of documentation. We are interested in the most trivial daily life, in these small gestures, these small practices which do not deserve to be told or recorded (such as the way of eating or dressing) and the less well-off strata of society, those which are called, in certain political speeches, the “invisible”. The “anatomical connections” between a given site and the rest of society are also highlighted.
Can you give an example of these connections?
I will take the example of the site of Pecq, in the Yvelines, where my colleague Ludovic Decock excavated the first passenger station in France, which was inaugurated in 1837. It was the terminus of the railway line leading from Paris at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. We found elements of the station, the tracks, the locomotive turnaround platforms, but also the remains of a pavilion intended to promote the train or even crockery with decorations on the railway theme. Here we are witnessing the birth of an industrial society where some are beginning to benefit from leisure and tourism.
How do you answer the question you often hear: “What is the point of excavating sites from recent periods for which there are many written testimonies, even sound recordings and films? »?
The industrial revolution induced profound changes in society with mass production and mass consumption, but the texts do not reveal the complexity of the daily life of the working world because, for all comers, for the plebs, nothing is recorded. . With the modern world, humans are treated a bit like a battery. The archeology of industrial societies is very interested in factories or tools, but not yet in the workers’ villages that were built near factories to attract labour. We are able to excavate residential areas of the Middle Ages but we do not excavate settlements, which we have the impression of knowing when many of the daily practices of their inhabitants escape us.
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