Today, modern society is faced with rapid climatic, environmental and technological change and the social and cultural consequences are open to debate. These changes are often seen as being inescapable of a predetermined evolution that is rooted in the collective imagination of a more or less distant prehistory. Prehistoric archaeology is often used, rightly or wrongly, to put two aspects of the history of societies into perspective: progress and resilience. Faced with the more or less rigorous use of knowledge in these debates, scholars of prehistoric sciences need to make their voices heard, especially when information is borrowed from older works that lack the application of new methods or updated knowledge. Problems relating to the respective roles of environmental, technical, social or cultural determinisms, on the one hand, and forms of collective intentionality («societal choices») on the other, are often detected. Societal choices have been highlighted in recent works such as David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book The Dawn of Everything... (2021) that interprets the trajectories of many ancient societies as the consequence of collective choices.
By organising this scientific meeting, the Société préhistorique française aims to draw on archaeological fact as well as anthropological stereotypes to help further discussion between archaeologists working in different fields of Prehistory, as well as promoting and enhancing the value of archaeological findings in a major social debate. The proceedings of the meeting will be published in a supplementary volume of the Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française at the end of 2024.