CULTURE “The day I became an archaeologist”, an essay by Dominique Garcia

Objective Gard: Becoming an archaeologist seems to be a long process. Does D-Day exist?

Dominic Garcia: I am an archaeologist. It’s being built little by little. When you love geography, history, heritage… you become one, but I could have been a teacher, shepherd or journalist at Objectif Gard! I was quite incapable of doing what didn’t interest me… I loved the scrubland, finding objects, discussing them, questioning peasants, learned people. That’s what amused me at first, but it was only later that I became an archaeologist.

And this book allows you to talk about it freely, to inspire?

What interests me is to have an archeology which is beneficial to all and which questions the questions of the moment, which are not the same today compared to those of 30 years ago. The book allows me to recount almost 50 years of evolution of archeology here, in Languedoc, but also in France and perhaps more widely in Europe. That’s kind of what I’m trying to do. The path was drawn without a career objective, I say it without pretension or false modesty, I wanted to know more and share what I knew. Those are my two goals. I wanted to do an archeology facing the present, not to do an archeology which accumulates old data and which does not allow us to flourish.

However, you have to make choices to live your dreams…

For me, I’ve been in Paris for 12 years. Even though I move around a lot, it’s a hell of a choice! I don’t know everything about where I’m going, but I’m going anyway. You have to take a step aside to be able to embrace other horizons, to be able to exchange with other people. It’s perhaps those kinds of moments where we tell ourselves that we’re doing something stupid but we do it and we take responsibility for it.

Know everything about something or a little about a lot?

When you stay in the same place, you get to know almost everything about almost nothing. Today, when I see colleagues who have worked on a site for 20 years, 30 years or 40 years, people who have been attached to sites for several decades, that also makes sense. Nîmes is the example of a real puzzle. Someone like Marc Cellié or Jean-Yves Breuil has perfect knowledge and that gives them a wealth that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It is a choice that is the right one if there is continuity, because without that we risk losing everything. At one point, I told myself that I would not be the specialist of a single site, of a single region but that I would move, travel, hoping to train myself. I don’t know if it was the right choice, it was mine.

Back in the 1970s, you put your hands in the dirt. Is there a thrill? An emotion?

Yes ! If you do archaeology, that’s why! There are plenty of other things besides, of course, but the emotion… Even today, I have it! When someone calls me to tell me that there is a discovery in a certain place, I go there, I move around. I’m proud of it because it makes me wonder about the discovery. Journalism defends democracy, the doctor will prevent us from catching the next virus and if the archaeologist cannot convey an emotion, transmit it, it is lost.

Remain a scientist, be in emotion and in transmission. Quite a role!

For me, this is essential. It is also a justification for my activity, I am paid every month to do archaeology. I have to share what I know. Then, sometimes, I give conferences where there are 15 people in a small village, but what is important is to transmit what we know. If we do human and social sciences, it is to do it for people.

Is archeology a reflection of the evolution of society?

Yes, of course. Today, when we talk about the environment, about migration, we can talk about it, in France, because we know that for a million years the territory has been occupied. However, the city is only 2,600 years old! Cities have only structured our landscapes for 2,000 years. We believe that the city is unique to Man. Archeology helps to put this into perspective on the scale of our lives. I’m not saying that you have to go into the woods, it’s just to give you the scale of the chronology. I had the chance to go to South Africa, to the place where the remains of the oldest humanoids were found. I’ve been on the field and everything, and when you’re there you feel human. I held the skull of Little Foot, I looked at it like a human, there is no dizziness since you are in the same humanity, in the same place. I almost felt at home in these landscapes, except that we hear guinea fowl and jaguars… This humanity is so close… When you go to a museum, well when I go to visit museums, I listen to people talking and they are surprised by this proximity.

Can we go further in the imagination of preservation?

La Fontaine, in Nîmes, is the concern for water. In a debate that I do not address in the book, it seems interesting to me to evoke the legal personality of natural spaces. Should a river like the Loire have rights? We’re going to look for Australian people because they did it. They gave legal personality to natural spaces to protect them. I am convinced that the Gauls were not idiots and that, if they had given sacred functions to certain places, like the Fountain, it was to protect them. The Fountain of Nîmes is perhaps the case of a legal personality of the Gallic period. Nîmes is lucky to have a green lung and it is also thanks to the archaeological site around the Fountain. Without that, everything would have been ruined. I think it’s the legacy of the status that the Gauls gave them, these people were wise enough to create this, it could make sense. They had this deep feeling, they were not crazy, they knew that the gods probably did not exist but when they created this sacred site, it was to protect it, it belonged to the entire Arecomic confederation. No one could appropriate it since it was the place where the god lived. Water was therefore for the benefit of all.

Today is it possible to become an archaeologist?

More today than then! When I was little, I didn’t say that I would become an archaeologist, the profession didn’t exist, it was a passion. In my village, the archaeologist sold shoes, that was his job. But he was learned and we went to see him when we found objects. There were very few archaeologists 50 years ago in Nîmes… Today, there are 20 times more, we have created a profession. In addition, an entire generation is reaching retirement, so in the next ten years there will be archaeological positions that will be accessible to well-trained people. Passionate people need to start charting their own path too.

You wrote this book to be read. What do you have to say to future readers?

I can say that archeology is a science in the present, this is what is close to my heart. Archeology is not scholarship, it is not made to be dusty but to interest children, families, the greatest number and not only to question the past, but also to provide responses to the future. Archeology can help nourish identities and cultures and I think that in the current debate that could make sense, it allows for a bit of nuance. It’s always good to do geography and history to try to shed light on the world, or at least to think about it better. I think it’s not useless.

“The day I became an archaeologist”, 192 pages, 18 euros. A few words: « Being an archaeologist means studying the various traces left by ancient human communities in order to better understand their history and their organization, their environment and their way of life. Archaeology, a popular discipline, is often associated with the terms “passion”, “fascination”, “enigma” or “exoticism”. But this testimony aims above all to illustrate what this discipline says about us, our contemporary society and the challenges that we must meet in the environmental, economic, technological, social and political fields. To help analyze the present and try to understand the future, I will therefore retrace my steps, visit different excavation sites and reopen scientific files: point out the “days” and the determining moments, and thus face the past to try to read in ancient traces a history in the making. From the Mediterranean coast to the sources of the Seine, this journey will take us into caves occupied by the first humans, above an ancient wreck, alongside a Celtic prince, in the streets of a Gallic city and even in the basements of Notre-Dame de Paris, explored following the tragic fire. »

Dominique Garcia has also published several books on the issue such as the latest on the issue, The Gauls with the naked eyeParis, CNRS Éditions, 2021, 170 p but also older works like Between Iberians and Ligurians: protohistoric Lodevois and middle Hérault valleyParis, CNRS Éditions, 1993, 358 p; Celtic territories: ethnic spaces and territories of protohistoric settlements in Western Europe, Paris, Errance, 2002, 420 p; Mediterranean Celtic: habitats and societies in Languedoc and Provence from the 8th to the 2nd century BC. J.-C., Paris, Errance, 2004, 208 p. ; Archeology of migrations, Paris, La Découverte/Inrap, 2017, 390 p. ; A history of civilizations: How archeology is changing our knowledge, Jean-Paul Demoule (dir.), Dominique Garcia (dir.) and Alain Schnapp (dir.), Paris, La Découverte, 2018, 700 p.