Conservation and study centres
Since 2008, the Ministry of Culture has promoted the development of a new type of equipment: the Conservation and Study Centre. It responds to a major challenge of current archaeological research: the safeguarding of soil archives and the needs of archaeologists and museums by organizing a pooling of resources and skills, in terms of preventive conservation, accessibility, scientific valorization of collections and data from excavations, and media coverage for the general public.
Ensure the conservation and exploitation of collections
The rise of preventive archaeology since the 1980s has led to a considerable increase in archaeological collections to be preserved. This is why the State initiated the development of "Centre for Conservation and Study" (CCE), which aims to create "new generation" archaeological repositories, adapted to the professional archaeological reality, to ensure optimal conservation and exploitation of collections.
The objective is to develop, in partnership with voluntary communities, a network of CECs throughout the national territory, responsible for federating and revitalizing the network of existing structures (archaeological deposits and associations, museums of France and local museums, universities...).
Save, study, preserve, inventory, enhance
The archaeological data is a non-renewable property: each year hundreds of archaeological sites disappear as a result of land use planning, most are fortunately excavated.
But in archaeology, to study is to destroy: the excavation which proceeds by stripping and by sampling, reveals at the same time as it destroys the object of its study, that is to say the archaeological site.
All the work of the archaeologist in the field consists in discovering and understanding the information scattered on the site.
It unearths the various clues of the site as they appear (archaeological furniture, traces of habitation, ditches, graves, etc.) and preserves the memory of the links between these different clues (location in the ground, relationship between the different traces, between the objects, bones, holes of poles, wells, walls, etc.) by means of plans, notes, photographs and various readings which he summarizes in his final report of operation.
At the end of this work, all the documentation, both the archives of excavations (plans, surveys, photos) and the archaeological furniture inventoried, is transferred to the conservation and studies center whose main mission is to preserve it in appropriate premises, to communicate it to students, researchers, curators who request it and to allow its valorization through the support of exhibitions implemented by museums.