Angélique Rougon is the main character from Le Rêve, a novel from Emile Zola’s Rougon–Macquart cycle, atypical because the author originally conceived of it in a way radically different from the rest of his work. He promises his heroine a happy destiny by moving her from her abandoned childhood identity to a triumphant marital status. But the tale fails at the same time as the project for a successful socialization, and the novel becomes an expression of two tensions: a literary tension on one side, because of the gap between the first plan and the completed text; and an anthropological tension on the other because it questions the possibility of a happy evolution from a symbolical savage state to an environment defined by its ancestral culture.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, French prehistory underwent a conceptual and methodological overhaul in line with the movement affecting the human sciences at the time. This change was brought about by a new generation of prehistorians, but some of the earliest, including Émile Cartailhac, were also at the forefront of the movement. The Toulouse prehistorian was not a systemic thinker, but conducted research into, and dissemination and promotion of prehistory at both the national and international level. He played an active role in the main debates renovating prehistory and proposed a series of compromises that reconfigured prehistoric practice by the renovation of methods and the opening up of new areas of investigation.

In November 1933 the room of Exotic Prehistory at the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro (MET) was first opened. Initially focusing on Africa, the project evolved when Paul Rivet incorporated Asian territories into it. The organizing of the room was partly the result of the institutionalization and professionalization of the French Science of Man during the interwar period, which was common to both ethnographic and ¨ anthropological collections. However, the acquisition and management of prehistoric collections, particularly those from Indochina, had their own specificities. The aim of this article is to examine, from a museum perspective, the concept of exotic prehistory, the types of objects that are promoted through it and the ways in which it was created and used at the MET.

This article aims to analyse the reception of the most well known works and discoveries in European prehistory in Argentina and Uruguay. The aim is to assess how terms and typologies proposed by French authors were adapted and challenged at a local level. Prehistorians from the north of the Italian peninsula played a fundamental role in this process. The article also refers to the news published in the Argentine press about the discoveries made in Europe, which inspired new vocations, particularly under the impetus of the professors in charge of the chair of natural history at the University of Buenos Aires.

The history of the recognition of Palaeolithic art has been written from the perspective of European discoveries in the last third of the 19th century. Through this case study of the publication of the Wandjina paintings (Australian Kimberley) by George Grey between 1838 and 1841 and through the contextualisation of the interpretations attributed to them the article investigates the intellectual and political space in which conceptions relating to the ability of Aborigines to produce this art emerged within the debates of contemporaries and, later, of English and French prehistorians. It also provides an insight into the different contexts that shaped the will to reconstruct the heritage of non–European cultures in a colonial context.