Paul Jamin. 1903. Société Préhistorique Française

All human societies have stories about their origins. Material objects, because they are visible and tangible, occupy a particularly important place in these stories. In the 19th century, the development of scientific archaeology in Western societies profoundly changed our relationship with these objects from the “past”, whose age suddenly revealed itself to be much greater than previously thought. Since then, scientific archaeology applied to prehistory has continued to maintain two tensions that are particularly difficult to communicate to the rest of society. Firstly, the dissonance between the evidence of prehistoric objects and their dating, spanning time scales that are difficult to imagine. Secondly, the production of discourse aimed at the truth, while accepting not only its fragmentary, limited and sometimes flawed nature, but also its perpetual questioning by the scientific approach.

In these accounts of origins, here and elsewhere, imagination fills in the gaps, especially where scientific knowledge dominates and invites societies to accept the discomfort of doubt. And since there is little to see when it comes to prehistory, the resources of the imagination are used to their fullest in the field of audiovisual creations. These media – films, sound creations, video games and web documentaries, whose distribution far exceeds that of scientific writings – thus constitute a particularly relevant observatory for better understanding the current state of relations between scientific knowledge, cultural productions and popular culture. For, yesterday as today, there was and is no watertight barrier between “science” and the rest of society: there are numerous collaborations between filmmakers and archaeologists or, for example, between game designers (video or otherwise) and scientists. These collaborations take various forms and are not without tensions, controversies and disagreements, all of which reveal something about the social dynamics at play around knowledge relating to “our” origins.