Gabriel de Mortillet

Mortillet, Gabriel de 

Born Aug. 29, 1821, in Meylan; died Sept. 25, 1898, in St. Germain-en-Laye. French archaeologist.

Mortillet took part in the Revolution of 1848 in France. From 1868 to 1885 he was a member of the staff of the St. Germain-en-Laye Museum of National Antiquities, where he was the curator of the section on prehistoric antiquities. He developed a chronological classification of the development of Paleolithic cultures, based on differences in tool-making techniques and in the shape of the tools. Although Mortillet was an evolutionist in the tradition of C. Darwin, he erroneously maintained that it was possible to apply the laws of flora and fauna development to primitive human society and to the development of the forms of objects of material culture.

WORKS

Musée préhistorique. [2nd ed.] Paris, 1903.
Doistoricheskaia zhizn’: Proiskhozhdenie i drevnost’ cheloveka. St. Petersburg, 1903. (Translated from French.)

REFERENCE

Boriskovskii, P. I., and S. N. Zamiatin. “Gabriel’ de Mortil’e.” Problemy istorii dokapitalisticheskikh obshchestv, 1934, nos. 7–8.