Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Like all summers, Bibracte will become an immense archaeological project: six excavations, foothills from the Gallic oppidum to its summit, led by university teams, but also young people aged 16, 17, will punctuate the season. “It is a real training center, Explains Andrea RochiSato, head of archaeological programs within the public establishment for cultural cooperation (EPCC) in Bibracte. Here, we can learn to search the Gauls, or the Roman, which is not at all the same thing. Even a protohistory teacher can teach excavation. »»
In three decades, the oppidum perched at the top of Mount Beuvray has become the European reference for Gallic archeology and the “Oppida civilization”. South of the Morvan massif, shared between Nièvre and Saône-et-Loire, Bibracte managed to attract the greatest specialists to its site, its museum, and its European research center for a few kilometers. In the 1980s, the site, which was no longer searched since 1914, took advantage of an resurgence of interest in the Iron Age, and the arrival of a Nivernais as President of the Republic. Thirty years later, the equipment defended by François Mitterrand has found its place, with 50,000 annual visitors and the status of a nerve center of research on the Iron Age.
Thanks to its presidential sponsor, the EPCC has benefited from an exceptional state subsidy since its inauguration in 1995, which corresponds to a good half of the 5.5 million euros in the operating budget. The establishment can invest regularly: construction of excavation shelters in 2008, a museography renewed in 2013, and for its thirtieth anniversary, a new temporary exhibition hall built in the basement for the museum. A space of 250 m², with climatic conditions standards, equipped with a reusable museum furniture system, which allows you to develop a programming of two exhibitions per year.
Everything seems to go for the best, in this scientific and cultural pole of European magnitude, nestled in the heart of a rural territory. But at the top of the oppidum, the future challenges are looming for the site: a stone’s throw from the most beautiful point of view of Mount Beuvray, a suffering hêtraie sees her trees depery little by little, struck by climate change. A landscaping impact that will not be without consequences for the attendance of the site: “The Bibracte public is not necessarily that of museums, we are a” green tourism “destination”recalls Vincent Guichard who has run the EPCC since 2008.
Since his arrival, the archaeologist launches research programs and scientific collaborations in which Bibracte is a pilot, relating to the management of archaeological data or digital mediation. The establishment thus targets European funding or those of the France 2030 plan to make its scientific activity last in the archaeological field.
The Bibracte museum seen from the research center in Glux-en-Glenne.
© Antoine Maillier
Forestry stake
But when you sit at the foot of the research center with Vincent Guichard, it is not on the Eduens and their ostentatious oppidum that the conversation carries, but rather on intensive agroforestry and the harmful harm (CAP) misdeeds on the Morvan landscape.
Because since 2008, the archaeological site has been at the heart of the large site of France “Bibracte-Morvan des Sommets”. “A very demanding labelunderlines the director, As much as the UNESCO World Heritage List, with an allocation brought into play every six years. »» With this ambition to preserve and manage a natural and agricultural heritage of 42,000 hectares, the action of the EPCC far exceeds the archaeological field. “Our allocations have not changed in fifteen years, the financing of the heritage is increasingly difficult to justify, contextualized Vincent Guichard, S‘Inscribing in this approach it was the way to justify that we intervene on the site. As there is no money, we will look for it. »»
Here too, the EPCC is committed to current affairs projects, likely to attract European funding: over the past four years, Bibracte has multiplied transdisciplinary research projects, on water management, sustainable agriculture or sustainable tourism. The most ambitious is certainly the partnership with AgroParistech, which transforms Mont Beuvray into a forest laboratory. The goal: to find a management model for forests undergoing global warming and intensive exploitation … while ensuring some resources specific to the establishment, whose first recipes come from wood.
“Our objective would be to set up a European network of observatories of protected areas, we use Beuvray as a place of experimentation and dialogue, by testing consultation devices with the actors of the territory”explains Vincent Guichard. Bibracte thus wants to be part of the Faro Convention (not ratified by France) which promotes heritage as a sustainable development tool for local communities.
From iron age to 20th century heritage
An attractive pole. The place attracts for its archaeological heritage and the natural landscapes of the Morvan. But Bibracte also has the potential of a destination for lovers of contemporary architectures. The museum, the research center, such as housing intended for passing researchers constitute the first large public order of Pierre-Louis Faloci, which will bring it the “silver square” in 1996. The architectural ensemble is the subject of the first course presented in the new spaces of temporary exhibitions, and won the label “Remarkable contemporary architecture”: landscape integration, stratigraphy Archeology, play on framing and perspectives mark the qualities of this architecture. All the following interventions were also carried out by Faloci, whose overhaul of permanent scenography: slight and intangible on the first level, then plunging the visitor into a dark and structured space on the ground floor. On the archaeological site, the architectural ride continues with the excavation shelters designed by Paul Andreu, architect of the Roissy-Charles de Gaulle terminal.
