Henri Breuil.html



Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (February 28, 1877, Mortain, Manche, Normandy–August 14, 1961, L'Isle-Adam, Val-d'Oise, France), often referred to as Abbé Breuil, was a French archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He is noted for his studies of cave art in the Somme and Dordogne valleys as well as in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, China with Teilhard de Chardin, Ethiopia, Somaliland and especially Southern Africa.

Life

Breuil received his education at the Seminary of St. Sulpice and the Sorbonne, and was ordained in 1900, and was given permission to pursue his research interests. He was a man of deep religious faith ¹. He assumed a post as lecturer at the University of Fribourg in 1905, and in 1910 became professor of prehistoric ethnology in Paris and at the Collège de France from 1925.²

Breuil was a competent draughtsman, faithfully reproducing the cave paintings he encountered. He published many book and monographs, introducing the caves of Lascaux and Altamira to the general public and becoming a member of the Institut de France in 1938.

Breuil visited the Peking Man excavations at Zhoukoudian, China in 1931 and confirmed the presence of stone tools at the site.

In 1929, when already a recognised authority on North African and European Stone Age art, he attended a congress on prehistory in South Africa. At the invitation of Jan Smuts he returned there in 1942 and took up a chair at Witwatersrand University from 1944 to 1951. During his South African stay he studied rock art in Lesotho, the eastern Free State and in the Natal Drakensberg. He undertook three expeditions to South West Africa and Rhodesia between 1947 and 1950. He described this period as "the most thrilling years of my research life". In 1953 he announced his discovery of a painting about 6 000 years old, subsequently dubbed The White Lady, under a rock overhang in the Brandberg Mountain.

Breuil returned to France in 1952 and produced a series of publications sponsored by the South African Government.

His contributions to European and African archaeology were considerable and recognised by the award of honorary doctorates from no fewer than six universities.

See also

• Cave painting
• Cave of the Trois-Frères
• Cueva de La Pasiega
• Altamira
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Selected English bibliography

• Rock Paintings of Southern Andalusia: A Description of a Neolithic and Copper Age Art Group (with M.C. Burkitt and Montagu Pollock). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928.
• The Cave of Altamira at Santillana del Mar, Spain (with Hugo Obermaier). Madrid, 1935.
• Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art. Montignac, Dordogne, 1952.
• The White Lady of the Brandberg (with Mary E. Boyle and E.R. Scherz). London: Faber and Faber; New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1955.
• The Men of the Old Stone Age. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965.
• The Paintings of the Tsisab Ravine
• The Rock Paintings of Southern Africa (with Mary E. Boyle)

Further reading

• Broderick, Alan Houghton. Father of Prehistory. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1963 (published in Great Britain under the title The Abbé Breuil: Prehistorian).
• Straus, L.G. "L'Abbé Henri Breuil: Archaeologist", Bulletin of the History of Archaeology. Vol. 2, No. 2. (1992), pp. 5–9.
• Straus, L.G. "L'Abbé Henri Breuil: Pope of Paleolithic Prehistory", Homenaje al Dr. Joaquín González Echegaray. Madrid: Museo y Centro de Investigación de Altamira, 1994, pp. 189–198.

References