Lartet, Édouard Armand Isidore Hippolyte

Lartet, Édouard Armand Isidore Hippolyte

▪ French geologist and archaeologist
born April 1801, Saint Guiraud, near Castelnau-Barbarens, Fr.
died January 1871, Seissan

      French geologist, archaeologist, and a principal founder of paleontology, who is chiefly credited with discovering man's earliest art and with establishing a date for the Upper Paleolithic Period of the Stone Age.

      A magistrate in the département of Gers, Lartet made his first discovery of fossil remains in 1834 near Auch in southwestern France. Thereafter he devoted much of his time to a systematic excavation of French caves. In 1852, at Aurignac, he found evidence of the contemporaneous existence of man and extinct animals, and in 1860 he discovered a number of early implements at Massat. His “Sur l'ancienneté géologique de l'espèce humaine dans l'Europe occidentale” (1860; “Antiquity of Man in Western Europe”) was followed by New Researches on the Coexistence of Man and of the Great Fossil Mamnifers Characteristic of the Last Geological Period (1861).

      From 1863, with the support of the English banker-ethnologist Henry Christy, he turned his attention to the Dordogne district and excavated a number of sites well known in the annals of prehistory, including Les Eyzies and La Madeleine, where, in particular, a mammoth bone bearing the engraved figure of an extinct animal was found in an undisturbed Ice Age deposit.

      With Christy, Lartet went on to show that the Stone Age comprised successive phases of human culture. They published their researches as Reliquiae Aquitanicae (“Aquitanian Remains”), the first part appearing in 1865, after Christy's death. Publication of this monumental work was completed in 1875 under the title Reliquiae Aquitanicae; Being Contributions to the Archaeology and Palaeontology of Périgord and the Adjoining Provinces of Southern France. From 1869 until his death Lartet was professor of paleontology at the museum of the Jardin des Plantes, Paris.

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Universalium. 2010.

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  • Lartet , Edouard Armand Isidore Hippolyte — (1801–1871) French paleontologist After studying law at Toulouse, Lartet – the son of a wealthy landowner – spent the earlier part of his life managing the family estates at St. Guiraud. His interest in paleontology was aroused in the early 1830s …   Scientists

  • Lartet — biographical name Édouard (Armand Isidore Hippolyte) 1801 1871 French archaeologist …   New Collegiate Dictionary

  • Cro-Magnon — /kroh mag neuhn, non, man yeuhn/, n. 1. an Upper Paleolithic population of humans, regarded as the prototype of modern Homo sapiens in Europe. Skeletal remains found in an Aurignacian cave in southern France indicate that the Cro Magnon had long… …   Universalium

  • Eyzies-de-Tayac caves — ▪ archaeological site, France series of prehistoric rock dwellings located downstream from Lascaux Grotto and near the town of Les Eyzies de Tayac in Dordogne département, southwestern France. The caves include some of the most significant… …   Universalium

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