A tribute to Serge Cleuziou (1945-2009)
Serge Cleuziou, professor of oriental archaeology at “Université
Paris I” and researcher at the CNRS passed away this Wednesday,
October 7 2009. A tribute to archaeology and to a great thinker.
________________
After a long and difficult illness, Serge
Cleuziou passed away yesterday at the age of 64, causing an
immense loss to relatives and friends and to science. He is
survived by his wife and two children whom he left too early.
Serge Cleuziou was a researcher at the CNRS since
1972 where he managed the team « du village à l’État au Proche-
et Moyen-Orient » of UMR 7041. His 30-year labour in Arabia and
Oman has considerably increased our knowledge of periods called
“in formation” from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Since 1985
he has lead 17 excavation and survey campaigns as well as 2
study campaigns in Oman within the Ra’s al-Hadd project, jointly
with his Italian friend and colleague Maurizio Tosi. His
personal investment in this project was considerable, and he
managed various competencies and efficient teams in the field.
Since 2005, he directed the « Adam oasis project » destined to
produce a general study of this region of the Sultanate of Oman
from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. In addition, he had an
intimate knowledge of Bronze Age sites in various areas of
Arabia, acquired from his excavations at al-Aïn (Abu Dhabi), Umm
Jidr (Bahraïn), at Wadi al-Jawf (Yemen), at Wadi Markha (Yemen),
and in the region of Wadi Hadramawt and north of Ramlat as-Sab’atayn
(Yemen). Determined to apply a more global approach, he equally
worked at the Strait of Hormuz, on the other side of the Gulf,
in Iran, and in Turkmenistan. He was one of those rare
researchers who master a large amount of data in a vast
territory with great rigor. This mastery was the result of a
considerable quantity and quality of labour and of readings.
From the start, he participated in the great
revolution of the archaeological practice with field work
developments in preventive archaeology, namely, using data
processing methods to automate data to allow for wider sampling
distributions, establishing comparisons, and using theoretical
questioning stemming from the Anglo-Saxon school methodology,
specifically those of the New Archaeology. At the turn of
the 1960s and 1970s, he participated in the first experiences of
computer-assisted automatic classification and seriation. All
his life he was profoundly marked by processualism, and he
applied this intellectually while always trying not to fall into
traps. After having recounted several times his first historic
meeting with Lewis Binford in the US, and while he was already
ill, he invites him to his laboratory at the Maison de
l’Archéologie et de l’Ethnologie in Nanterre in March 2007. A
moving historic meeting marked by intense theoretical
discussions.
Serge Cleuziou has always managed to take
advantage of the last scientific methods which he used in a
reasonable and coordinated manner in the field: GPS systems,
paloenvironmental analyses (paleobotany, paleoclimatology, but
also sedimentology and others), seriations and statistical
studies, multi-agent modelisation tools, etc. He had an amazing
capacity to work with specialists from widely different fields,
and to establish a useful dialog. At ease with all types of
materials, he participated in modelisation experiences which
required both the mastery of a great variety of scientific data
and a high capacity for abstraction.
His career and intellectual evolution led him to
explore research themes that were very varied. This, in turn,
drove him to explore trajectories for social evolution which led
or not to the State. One remembers seminars in “comparative
archaeology and theories in archaeology” which he gave with
Pascal Ruby years ago on transversal themes. They were a
passionate pair, extremely stimulating for students, and they
shared their epistemological thinking on archaeology as well as
their relationship with cultural anthropology following various
schools of thought. Nevertheless it was not rare when he warned
us against the bias of simplification from classification:
« Les régularités que l’archéologie et l’anthropologie cherchent
à établir sont continuellement trahies par ceux là même auxquels
on voudrait les appliquer ».
«The regularity that archaeology and anthropology
want to establish are continually betrayed by those same ones
for which we would want to apply them ».
Serge Cleuziou, « Pourquoi si tard ? nous avons pris un autre
chemin. L’Arabie des chasseurs-cueilleurs de l’Holocène au début
de l’Age du Bronze ». dans Jean Guilaine (dir.) 2005,
Aux marges des grands foyers du Néolithique : périphéries
débitrices ou créatrices ?
Paris, Errance, p. 123-148.
Hence, it is both complexity and complexification
which mattered for him to grab during his research.
In addition, this serious and academic picture
would be incomplete if we did not mention his sense of humour
which was of a great professional quality, so as to allow him
never to consider himself too seriously.
One
always remembers him re-reading his articles:
« à l’auteur de ces lignes, qui cherchait à comprendre ce qui
décidait une famille à se déplacer d’un endroit à l’autre, un
vieux bédouin ridé par le vent et le soleil du désert répondit
récemment : ‘c’est quand ma femme me le dit…’. »
«to the author of these lines, who was trying to
understand what decided a family to move from place to place, an
old Bedouin marked by the wind and desert sun responded
recently:’ it is when my wife tells me …’ . »
Serge Cleuziou, “The Early Bronze Age of the Oman Peninsula :
from chronology to the dialectics of trade and State formation”,
dans S. Cleuziou, M. Tosi & J. Zarins (dir.) 2002, Essays on
the Late Prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula, Serie
Orientale Roma CXIII, IsIAO, Rome, p. 191-246.
Inseparable from the spirit of theory, he was
above all a man of the concrete, who had fun when he saw the
boat sinking in Sûr. This boat had been built in collaboration
with Tom Vosner during an archaeological expedition along III
millenary methods, with fragments of bituminous caulking dug out
of the Ra’s al-Jinz site.
Chairman of the Oriental archaeology chair of the Paris 1
Panthéon-Sorbonne University since 2003, he had a real passion
for teaching: even too much so, since he directed the research
of a large number of students, much beyond the quotas
established by the administration. He also invested himself in
university life and had a real commitment to the administrative
functions he managed: member of the commission for excavations
at the ministry of foreign affaires, direction of the
archaeology master's program for the archaeology of historical
periods at University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, jointly with
the management of numerous multi-disciplinary research projects
(ECLIPSe, ACI, SOPHOCLE, etc.).
The teachings he transmitted to his students were
innumerable but among the most memorable are rigor, autonomy,
team work, and most of all openness of mind. Curious and
interested in everything, he insisted - almost in a militant
fashion – upon the necessity to open the dialog with other
disciplines: « archaeology leads to everything, providing
that you get out of it». He developed a critical mind among
his students which he always practiced himself in an elegant
manner as was obvious when he criticized his own interpretative
models, a rare quality within the researchers’ community.
« A lot of time and research have taken place
since the time when I imprudently commented upon the restricted
material at hand for the ‘Wadi Suq'’ period and considered it as
‘the last known sedentary culture before the transition of
Eastern Arabia full-time nomadism’ in the early second
millennium B.C.”
Serge Cleuziou, “The Early Bronze Age of the Oman Peninsula :
from chronology to the dialectics of trade and State formation”,
dans S. Cleuziou, M. Tosi & J. Zarins (dir.) 2002, Essays on
the Late Prehistory of the Arabian Peninsula,
His infallible methodology allowed him to direct
very varied research, as this exercise was imposed upon him by
the wide spectrum of his chair, from the Near East to Central
Asia and from the Caspian Sea to the Indian Ocean, from the end
of the Paleolithic to the Achaemenid period. At the opposite end
of the spectrum from actual tendencies, he was among those who
invite their students to develop their own projects and work out
their own themes. Whenever a student presented original ideas,
they often provoked such enthusiasm that one had difficulty
imagining that the researcher had a long career behind him. A
sentence he often pronounced after a careful and rigorous exam
of the projects: «Go ahead, I’m behind you! » indicates
that he considered archaeology and research as a real adventure
and placed his students in the midst of it.
In reality he preceded us all and still does.
Serge Cleuziou blended his qualities in a subtle
mix rarely found in one man: a fine connoisseur of field work
coupled with a concrete practice of his discipline, an excellent
researcher, and a dedicated teacher with human sensitivity whose
years of practice and difficulties never undermined his capacity
to be dazzled.
If the seminars, work meetings, courses,
lectures, interviews and passionate discussions can no longer
take place, the researcher has not disappeared. He leaves behind
around 100 articles, numerous notes and contributions in various
publications, 79 international meetings, and approximately 140
scientific and public lectures. The outcome of these years of
labour can be found in the work: In the Shadow of the
ancestors. The Prehistoric foundations of Early Arabian
Civilization in Oman published jointly with his close
Italian colleague Maurizio Tosi in 2007. He also leaves behind
several projects, in which he considerably invested himself, and
that his colleagues will have to pursue. His students and old
students, now orphans, will have to prove that they can be
worthy of such a great intellectual heritage so that his work
can live on.
by Emmanuelle Honoré, October 8, 2009.
________________
A ceremony will be held on Saturday October 10,
2009 at 13:30.
Funérarium 7 boulevard de Ménilmontant - Paris 11e. France.
Serge Cleuziou will then be buried in Corrèze. |
