Sudden death of the director of the Lons-le-Saunier Museum

Director and curator of the Archaeological Museum of Lons-le-Saunier (Jura), Jean-Luc Mordefroid died on October 20, 2024 at the age of 62, the victim of a stroke. Jean-Yves Ravier, the mayor of Lons-le-Saunier (Jura), paid tribute to him alongside the museum teams: “it was the memory of Lédonian heritage”he declared. The farewell ceremony will be held in the Cordeliers church in Lons-le-Saunier on Friday October 25.

A local figure and field man committed to the conservation of the heritage of his region, Jean-Luc Mordefroid was at the head of the Lons-le-Saunier Museum for several years. Born in Bourg-en-Bresse, he moved to Lons-le-Saunier with his family at the age of eight. An archaeologist by training, he began his career as museum director after leading major excavations in France, Switzerland and Belgium. He was recruited by the town of Lons-le-Saunier in 1989 as a municipal archaeologist. Jean-Luc Mordefroid has since invested himself with passion in the cultural life of the city and the region, he notably directed the Rouget Museum in L’Isle and the historical heritage and municipal archives service. Jean-Luc Mordefroid has published numerous writings on the cultural and archaeological heritage of the Jura.

The archaeological museum, founded in 1812 under the Empire, houses a large collection of objects from excavations in the region as well as local or exotic donations from individuals. The museum has archaeological and natural science collections which are preserved at the Lons-le-Saunier conservation and study center. The collections encompass 145,000 years of Jura history from the Lower Paleolithic to contemporary times. The museum notably preserves a fossil of the plateosaurus “the flat lizard”, the oldest dinosaur (-210 million years old), a sort of ancestor of the diplodocus and the brontosaurus, discovered in the region in 1982.

The museum does not have space to display the collections. These are the subject of occasional thematic exhibitions in the rooms of the Lons-Le-Saunier Museum of Fine Arts. A project aborted in 2020 launched the idea of ​​a new museum bringing together the fine arts collections and the archaeological collections in the Hôtel-Dieu in order to allow better visibility of the archaeological pieces. The project was abandoned due to lack of funding according to Progress.

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