From the second half of the 19th century, prehistory developed, both theoretically and in the field, according to a European model. Concepts and vocabulary, but also collections and European sites, were established as axioms. This construction of prehistory took place during the expansion of ethnographic missions and colonial empires. This European prehistory with universal ambitions had to take into account an otherness, current and embodied by the savage, which had become an object of study for the emerging human sciences. From a historiographical point of view, many relationships remain to be clarified with regard to the interactions between European prehistory and the construction of a prehistory beyond Europe.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), leading voice of British Victorian anthropology, significantly contributed to the sciences of prehistory by theorising the universality of the Stone Age in his work entitled Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). In meeting this challenge, Tylor offers a comparative overview of extra–European archaeology, linguistics and ethnography, as well as of data on European prehistory, languages and folklore. Focusing on the first edition of the Researches, this essay analyses Tylor’s generalizations about the Stone Age, their methodological and theoretical issues, their key–notions and data as well as their reception at the third session of the International Congress of Prehistoric Anthropology and Archaeology (1868).

This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of the historical and scientific context of the development of early research in the prehistory of Egypt. In particular, it explores to what extent the construction of prehistory as a field in Egypt at the beginning of the 20th century has been influenced by the European model of prehistory, by focusing on two case studies, which are the works of Paul Bovier– Lapierre in the Abbassieh region, near Cairo, and the works of Edmond Vignard in the Kom Ombo region.

This article begins when Jean Perrot (1920–2012), a young French archaeologist, arrives in British Mandate Palestine, at the end of the Second World War. Retracing his career and presenting the Israeli institutions and networks he relied on allows us to measure his role in the shaping of the field of prehistory during the formative years of the State of Israel. This takes us back in time, to the origins of the French prehistoric–presence in Palestine in the 19th century and its evolution during the British Mandate times. Lastly, this contextualized approach, on the longue durée, contributes to the history of the establishment, in Jerusalem, of a new French research structure dedicated to prehistory in the second half of the 20th century.

This article offers a first survey investigating the practice of displaying objects belonging to ancient civilisations of the Italian peninsula alongside those of the peoples living in the African colonies – and beyond – during the end of 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. I will analyse the development of the discipline known in Italy as paletnologia in close connection with the European context and how it was presented in museums through its association with artefacts belonging to the so–called present–day primitives. Finally, the article will conclude by discussing the paradigm shift happening at the time of the Fascist Empire.