Jean-Marie Pesez (1929–1998) was a French

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

and historian who studied rural civilization and

medieval In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the Post-classical, post-classical period of World history (field), global history. It began with t ...

and preindustrial

material culture Material culture is the aspect of social reality grounded in the objects and architecture that surround people. It includes the usage, consumption, creation, and trade of objects as well as the behaviors, norms, and rituals that the objects creat ...

. Pesez became an aggregated professor in 1958. He served as the Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He served in the same position at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences starting in 1975. He was one of the pioneers of the comeback of medieval archeology in France in the 1960s and 1970s.Alain Guerreau, L'Avenir d'un passé incertain : Quelle histoire du Moyen Âge au XXIe siècle ?, éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 148. His work helped popularize the study of material civilization and country life in the Middle Ages. Notably, he was the co-director of a French-Polish study on abandoned villages in Europe, which was part of historians' and archeologists' growing interest in rural living and country civilization. His new approach to archeology incorporated history,

ethnography Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject o ...

, and

anthropology Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

. Between the 1960s and 1997, he educated many professional and amateur archeologists through his academic seminars at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences and excavations in France, Sicily, and Greece. He presided over the Conseil National de la Recherche Archéologique for many years.

References

Bibliography

*Pesez (Jean-Marie), ''L'archéologie : mutations, missions, méthodes'', Paris, Armand Colin, 2007, pp. 128 *Collectif, ''Le village médiéval et son environnement : études offertes à Jean-Marie Pesez'', Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998, pp. 682 (bibliography) *Pesez (Jean-Marie), ''Archéologie du village et de la maison rurale au Moyen Âge'', Lyon, Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1998, pp. 515 (Complete collection of Pesez's articles) *Pesez (Jean-Marie), "Histoire de la culture matérielle", in Jacques Le Goff (dir.), ''La nouvelle histoire'', Paris, Retz, Encyclopédie moderne, 1978, pp. 98–130 *Pesez (Jean-Marie, dir. et coll.), ''Brucato : histoire et archéologie d'un habitat médiéval en Sicile'', Rome, École française de Rome, 1978

External links

List of Publications (in French)
1929 births 1998 deaths 20th-century French archaeologists {{France-scientist-stub