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Modern and contemporary archaeology, the French equivalent of historical archaeology, emerged in the 1970s. Subsequent attempts at theorising this sub-discipline have been hindered by a lack of broad professional recognition and funding. While the archaeology of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is now more widely recognised in France, studies of the post-nineteenth-century period remain limited to a few specific contexts. Here, the author offers an overview for the Anglophone readers of modern and contemporary archaeology in France and argues that greater theorisation, cross-fertilisation with other archaeological traditions and a diversification of the range of themes considered might enhance recognition of this sub-discipline within and beyond France. Keywords: Western Europe, France, historical archaeology, contemporary archaeology, archaeological theory, Introduction Is there a unified theory of historical or contemporary archaeology in France? Since the late 1970s, there have certainly been many attempts to achieve common theoretical grounds but the [...]

In the 19th century, French youth detention was a necropolitical enterprise aimed at controlling precarious social classes. Built in the 1840s in Normandy, Ferme Neuve is a rare example of the first generation of public youth penal colonies in France. First an annex to the prison of Gaillon, from 1862 to 1868, it then formed the core of the youth penal colony of Les Douaires. This paper reconstructs the history so-far disregarded of Ferme Neuve, demolished in the 1960s, and produces a 3D digital reconstruction of what its built environment might have looked like. It then goes on to discuss the high mortality at Ferme Neuve, emphasizing the responsibility of the French state in this surplus of deaths and arguing that this system prefigured contemporary processes of othering poor and racialized youth in France. The paper ends by discussing the need to politicize archaeologies of incarceration in the recent past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In eighteenth and nineteenth century Senegal, women constituted most of the enslaved population. Despite this demographic overrepresentation, contemporary memories of enslavement are predominantly androcentric. This article highlights this androcentrism and ties it to changes in labour and gender that occurred under racial capitalism. A study of 100 newspaper articles published in Senegalese and French media during the last decade reveals that 55 percent of them were biased towards describing enslaved people as masculine figures, versus only 11 percent representing them as women. This androcentrism of memories can be attributed to the conflation of the trans-Atlantic trade with the local indigenous trade, the patriarchal nature of the Senegalese state inherited from colonialism, and the transition to racial capitalism under which women's labour was rendered invisible. Today, these memorial processes hide the negative socio-economic legacies of enslavement on racialised working-class women and children. These findings illustrate the necessity to centre gender dynamics in studies of the memories and archaeology of enslavement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]