The unprecedented development of archaeological research over the past thirty years has allowed us to lift the veil on a large part of Cotentin’s history for more than 300,000 years.
A series of extraordinary exhibitions
Two exhibitions organized by the Thomas Henry Museum of Cherbourg in Cotentin offer to explore these data through the presentation of the remains of several emblematic sites of the region.
Thomas Henry Museum
The first exhibition, currently presented, covers Prehistory and Protohistory until the very beginning of Antiquity. For this first exhibition, two curators, Dominique Cliquet, archaeologist at SRA and specialist of the entire Palaeolithic period, and Cyril Marcigny, specialist in Protohistory, from the Neolithic to the Iron Age.
The exhibition immerses the visitor in the heart of current archaeological research in the territory:
- The excavations of the Rozel (where 2,200 footprints of Neanderthal men and animals were found! An exceptional site in the hollow of a fossil dune overlooking the present Rozel beach, where Dominique Cliquet exhumed hundreds of footprints, which show how a group of Neanderthals, from infant to adult, parked and walked),
- d'Auderville (Semaphore site excavated in the 1990s by C. Marcigny),
- Tatihou (a very rich heritage site off the coast of Saint Vaast la Hougue and whose history has partly been revealed through archaeology),
- from the Gaulish village of Urville (site that delivered objects remarkably well preserved thanks to the wet environment: objects worked on the spot from lignite imported from England, funerary urns, coins, remains of consumption of marine cetaceans...).
These examples allow us to understand how the Cotentin peninsula was occupied during prehistory and protohistory: habitats, burial sites, births of agrarian practices…
Many objects discovered in the region are exhibited, accompanied by technological resources: a Bronze Age house is to be visited (virtually) in order to observe its inhabitants in their daily activities.
A presentation of the techniques of archaeosciences is also possible in particular of palynology (formalization of a landscape from a microscopic grain of pollen).
Rozel site, B. Fauq
Saint Vaast la Hougue, Tatihou Island, G. Fauq
Surtainville, Neandertal, D. Cliquet
An exhibition to discover urgently!
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