Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin, 1900 – 1991

Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin in front o f the sculpted frieze of the Roc-aux-Sorcier. © MAN, Fonds Saint-Mathurin

Suzanne Cassou de Saint-Mathurin was a noted French prehistorian who lived at Reid Hall in the 1930s. It is difficult to determine when exactly she resided at the Club, but she is mentioned as a guest at Dorothy Leet’s goodbye party in an article in the New York Herald Tribune, and is identified as "formerly a student in residence at Reid Hall (March 8, 1938, RH Archives). She was possibly one of the five French scholarship students invited to the Club on a yearly basis.

Saint-Mathurin earned a Bachelor of Letters at St. Hilda's College, Oxford University in 1931, where she completed a thesis on the influence of Diderot's biological ideas on his romanesque works, under the tutelage of French literary scholar Gustave Rudler.

Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin, Mary Boyle, Henri Breuil, n.d. © MAN, Fonds Saint-Mathurin. Archéologie.culture.fr

Like Mary Boyle, Saint-Mathurin became seriously interested in prehistory after meeting the Abbé Henri Breuil in 1932. In 1939, she worked with Breuil to classify the prehistory archives of the Natural History Museum in Bordeaux. She then accompanied him on several digs in France and other countries, working notably on the caves of Pair-non-Pair (Gironde) and La Marche (Lussac-les-Châteaux, Vienne).

Breuil introduced Saint-Mathurin to Dorothy Garrod, Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge University from 1939 to 1952.

 

Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin and Dorothy Garrod, Roc-aux-sorciers. 1948. © MAN, Fonds Saint-Mathurin. Archéologie.culture.fr

The collaboration between Saint-Mathurin and Garrod generated a strong friendship and working relationship that lasted until Garrod's death in 1968. The latter was a guest speaker at Reid Hall in 1961 (Minutes, RH board, January 1961) and appears to have also lived at the Club for a time.

Saint-Mathurin, Garrod, and Germaine Henri-Martin, another French archaeologist, collaborated so closely at several prehistoric sites in France that they were nicknamed "Les Trois Grâces" (Cohen 406).

Between 1947 and 1957, Saint-Mathurin and Garrod conducted extensive fieldwork on the parietal high- and low-relief carvings at the Taillebourg cave and the abri Bourdois, the two sites of the Roc-aux-Sorciers (Angles-sur-l'Anglin, Vienne), which had been first investigated by Lucien Rousseau in 1927. They continued their work on this site, which dated to the Magdalenian era, until 1964, thanks to funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. They discovered a 20-meter-long sculpted frieze with bas-reliefs and paintings of bison, horses, ibexes, wild cats, human figures, and a carving of a human face. They also uncovered statuettes, sculpted blocks, and engraved teeth (Pinçon CD1549).

Les Trois Grâces joined together late in their careers to aid a significant site in peril, a cave called Ras el-Kelb in Lebanon. The year was 1959, and two tunnels were being blasted through the rock; the integrity of the Paleolithic cave would be destroyed [...] The women worked for seven weeks straight in an environment of deafening jackhammers. Wet tents and snakes would have been preferable. Some of the site’s strata, or the soil layers, were also as hard as cement. No shovel stood a chance. Garrod decided that the only way to truly assess what the prehistoric site contained was to cut out blocks of the cement-like earth called breccia with high power drills [...] (Adams 176-177).

Later, Saint-Mathurin worked in the Centre-Ouest region of France, actively participating in the scientific undertakings of the Laboratoire de préhistoire du gisement de La Quina, founded by Léon Henri-Martin.

Le Roc-aux-sorciers. Archéologie.culture.fr

In 1973, Saint-Mathurin donated sculpted blocks from the Roc-aux-Sorciers to the Musée de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and later gifted the reconstituted head of a man etched and painted in the cave at Angles-sur-l'Anglin to the French government. She donated Garrod's important collection of original negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1986. Upon her death in 1991, Saint-Mathurin bequeathed to France the Roc-aux-Sorciers, which she had purchased during her excavations (Fuentes). She also deposited her archives and library at the National Museum of Archaeology. Her archives contain site notebooks, photographs, letters, diaries, and draft papers from both Saint-Mathurin and Garrod. Work on the Roc-aux-Sorciers and in the archives has been carried forward by the archaeologist Geneviève Pinçon, Director of Centre national de préhistoire (Périgeux).

Sources

  • Adams, Amanda. Ladies of the field: Early women archaeologists and their search for adventure. Vancouver: D&M Publishers, 2010.
  • Cohen, Getzel M. and Martha Joukowsky. Breaking Ground : Pioneering Women Archaeologists. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
  • Davies, William and Ruth Charles. Dorothy Garrod and the Progress of the Palaeolithic. Oxford, England: Oxbow Books, 2017.
  • "Des femmes poitevines d'exception." Cybergroupe généalogique de Charentes-Poitou.
  • Fuentes, Oscar and Geneviève Pinçon. "Le Roc-aux-Sorciers: Du site au centre d’interprétation, un choix scénographique original." Les nouvelles de l'archéologie, vol. 117, 2009, pp. 51- 56. OpenEdition.
  • Guillien, Y; and Suzanne de Saint-Mathurin. "Le gisement du Roc-aux-Sorciers et la séquence climatique du Magdalénien." Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française, vol. 73, no. 1, 1976, pp. 15-21. Persée.
  • Lakovleva, L. and Geneviève Pinçon. Angles-sur-l’Anglin (Vienne), La Frise sculptée du Roc-aux-Sorciers. Paris : Co-édition Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientifiques et Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1997.
  • Lawson, Andrew J. Painted Caves: Palaeolithic Rock Art in Western Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 209-210.
  • Pinçon, Geneviève. "Art mobilier et art pariétal du Roc-aux-Sorciers (Angles-sur-l’Anglin, Vienne, France) : disparités ou sens communs ?" In Clottes, J. (dir.), L’art pléistocène dans le monde / Pleistocene art of the world / Arte pleistoceno en el mundo, Actes du Congrès IFRAO, Tarascon-sur-Ariège, septembre 2010, Symposium « Art mobilier pléistocène ». N° spécial de Préhistoire, Art et Sociétés, Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Ariège-Pyrénées, vols. 65-66, 2010-2011, pp. 1549-1558.
  • "Le Roc-aux-Sorciers." Hominides.com.
  • Saint-Mathurin, Suzanne de and Dorothy Garrod. "Nouvelles découvertes dans l'Abri du Roc aux Sorciers à Angles-sur-l'Anglin (Vienne) : 'Vénus paléolithiques.'' Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 95, no. 1, 1951, pp. 52-57. Persée.
  • Saint-Mathurin, Suzanne de and Dorothy Garrod. "Une frise sculptée du Magdalénien ancien découverte à Angles-sur-l'Anglin, dans la Vienne." Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 94, no. 2, 1950, pp. 123-128.
  • Saint-Mathurin, Suzanne de and Dorothy Garrod. "Fragments de bas-reliefs découverts dans le gisement magdalénien d'Angles-sur-l'Anglin." Comptes rendus des séances de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, vol. 93, no. 2, 1949, pp. 138-142.
  • Saint-Mathurin, Suzanne de.  "Annie Elizabeth Garrod (5 février 1892 - 18 décembre 1968)." Syria. Archéologie, Art et histoire, vol. 46, no.3-4 ,1969,  pp. 385-393.
  • Saint-Mathurin, Suzanne de. 1988. "Les sculptures rupestres du Roc-aux-Sorciers." Dossiers d’archéologie, vol. 131, pp. 42-49.