Maddalena Cataldi

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.

Based on a case study, this paper aims to examine the scientific, industrial and political interests that intertwine at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair. We will focus on a graphic composition that was elaborated from various copies of rock art presented in several pavilions of the Exhibition and published by a science magazine. This figure was composed to compare the artistic capacities of European prehistoric and African contemporary primitives, all belonging, in the discourse of the French anthropologists, to the same race. The article considers the construction of anthropology in public space as a science claiming to be capable of analysing racial relationships in their environment and therefore capable of scientifically directing the French colonial project.

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.