"With archeology, (...) we finally share a common passion which is the passion for the soil and the subsoil", summed up Thursday, during a press conference, Nicolas Vuillier, president of the Union national quarrying industry and building materials (Unicem), main federation of the sector.
"The quarrymen, it is to go there to seek the mineral resources and archeologies it is to go there to explain the human occupation (...) on the territories in question", he detailed.
Mr. Vuillier was speaking on the occasion of the launch of a website: this illustrates, through the interactive map of around thirty French quarries, the archaeological discoveries made in these places from which the materials are extracted then serving all manufacturers.
This site, a "digital atlas" filled with detailed explanations and videos, was born from a collaboration between Unicem and another federation, the National Union of Aggregate Producers (UNPG), as well as a public institute archaeologists, the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).
"Like when you are looking for a restaurant, there, in this case, you are looking for a career (...) and there is much more information than when you are looking for (elements) on a restaurant: you have the file, the historical elements, which excavated, dating ", described Dominique Garcia, president of Inrap about the site available at archeology-careers.inrap.fr
These discoveries are not limited to remote times: near Caen, where the landings of June 6, 1944 have just been commemorated, a career was discovered five years ago where civilians taken by bombs had taken refuge during of the two months of battle that followed the start of the Allied offensive.
Historical links
Archaeologists and quarry operators are used to working together: born in the 1960s in the context of major real estate work, "preventive" archeology aims to safeguard the potential remains located on a site.
Since 2001, a law has governed this collaboration. If, after an initial diagnosis, the site is considered promising in archaeological matters, the operator of the quarry must undertake excavations at his expense, but he can also refrain from doing so by moving the work site.
It is "a virtuous system that forces us to work together," said Garcia. "Thanks to the work produced by the quarries, the archaeologists draw information. Then, (...) they are no longer on the ground and the developer can build on this site."
Beyond this legal framework, the archaeologist insists on the historical links between his discipline and economic activity around quarries, stressing that it is these relationships that allowed the first discoveries around prehistory.
"It was by exploiting, in the valley of the Somme in the 19th century, aggregates that we came across the first flints," explained Mr. Garcia. "If we had not exploited these aggregates, we would not have found these vestiges and therefore, we would not have wondered about the age of humanity."
"We were interested in churches, we were interested in temples and not necessarily in the oldest levels that were buried in the ground," he insisted. "Archeology was ultimately invented in quarries."
This week again, it was a child of a materials professional, the archaeologist Miguel Biard, who announced a remarkable discovery in Angoulême: engravings of horses dating back to 12.000 years.
"When he was little, his dad was a sailor and transported materials on the Seine," said Garcia. "He was sitting on the heaps of sand that his dad was carrying and (...) he collected the flints that he sorted while his father transported the materials."
Finally, quarries in turn become heritage objects, as illustrated by the example near Caen, and the archaeologist nuances in this respect the simplistic idea of an economic activity that would damage an unshakable heritage.
"We visit the great ancient quarries, the great medieval quarries (...) not as something that destroyed the environment but as something that (in) it is constitutive," he concluded. "The environment is something man-made."