Today the engraved pebble from Étiolles is conserved and displayed at the musée de Préhistoire d’Île-de-France in Nemours.
The musée de Préhistoire d’Île-de-France in Nemours (Seine-et-Marne) is based in the administrative department of Seine-et-Marne, but its displays cover the whole region. Its exhibitions tell the story of prehistory in the Paris region, from the first remains attesting to the presence of man (around 600,000 years ago) to the end of the Gallic period (the last quarter of the 1st century BCE).
Completed in 1980, the building, in concrete and glass, was designed by architect and urbanist Roland Simounet. Backing on to the natural slope of the land, the museum is located in undergrowth sprinkled with sandstone. Since October 2002 the building has been listed on the Inventaire Supplémentaire des Monuments Historiques (ISMH) and designated as a 20th-century heritage site with the label “Patrimoine du XXe siècle”.
A ramp at the museum entrance reminds visitors of the major stages of human evolution. The visit continues with a cast of a sector of prehistoric land at Étiolles, showing the excavation work carried out. The visit is then chronological. There are two rooms for each major period (a main and secondary room), separated by an indoor garden whose vegetation is a micro-landscape of the climate of the period concerned.
At the centre of the building, an audio-visual feature about reindeer hunters in the Upper Palaeolithic runs alongside a large cast of the terrain at the Pincevent site.
The visit ends with the presentation of a large boat from the Carolingian period, discovered in a former channel of the Seine.
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