Musée des Merveilles in

Tende Tende (; Italian, Occitan and Royasc: ''Tenda'') is a commune in the Alpes-Maritimes department in southeastern France. Geography Tende is located within Mercantour National Park in the French Alps. The mountainous commune is bordered by Ital ...

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of Overseas France, overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific Ocean, Pac ...

is a museum that documents stone age and other historic artefacts from the

Mercantour National Park Mercantour National Park (french: Parc national du Mercantour) a French national park located in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and Alpes-Maritimes departments. Since it was created in 1979, the park has proven popular, with 800,000 visitors annu ...

. It opened in 1996. There is notably a large collection of real and reproduced

petroglyph A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form of rock art. Outside North America, scholars often use terms such as "carving", "engraving", or other descriptions ...

s from the surroundings of the nearby Bégo Mountain. The museum's name comes from the nearby

Vallée des Merveilles Vallée is a French surname. Notable people with the surname include: *André Vallée (1930–2015), Canadian Roman Catholic bishop *Anne Vallée (born 1958), Canadian biologist *Bernard Vallée (born 1945), French fencer *Brigitte Vallée (born 19 ...

History

Located in the Mont Bego region on the Franco-Italian border, the

rock Rock most often refers to: * Rock (geology), a naturally occurring solid aggregate of minerals or mineraloids * Rock music, a genre of popular music Rock or Rocks may also refer to: Places United Kingdom * Rock, Caerphilly, a location in Wales ...

engravings mainly cover two major sites: the Vallée des Merveilles and the Vallée de Fontanalbe. Surveyed for millennia, the first mention of the

is due to Pierre de Montfort in 1460. It is not mentioned in the literature until the sixteenth century but will not arouse the interest of researchers until the end of the 1800s. From 1879, the Englishman

Clarence Bicknell Clarence Bicknell (27 August 1842 – 17 July 1918) was a British vicar, amateur archaeologist, botanist, artist, Esperantist, author and philanthropist. He founded the Bicknell Museum in Bordighera, Italy. Also named after him is a street in Bor ...

developed a passion for this site and devoted thirty years of his life to it. Between the two wars, the engravings were studied by the Italians Piero Barocelli and Carlo Conti, who recorded thirty-five thousand engravings between 1927 and 1942. But it was from 1967 that researchers from the

Musée de l'Homme The Musée de l'Homme ( French, "Museum of Mankind" or "Museum of Humanity") is an anthropology museum in Paris, France. It was established in 1937 by Paul Rivet for the 1937 ''Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne' ...

, the anthology laboratory and the

Lazaret A lazaretto or lazaret (from it, lazzaretto a diminutive form of the Italian word for beggar cf. lazzaro) is a quarantine station for maritime travellers. Lazarets can be ships permanently at anchor, isolated islands, or mainland buildings. ...

departmental laboratory in Nice, with the collaboration of many researchers, began a more systematic campaign of field surveys.

References

External links

Official site
Museums in Alpes-Maritimes Archaeological museums in France {{France-museum-stub