EDGAR CLERC MUSEUM

Departmental Museum of Amerindian Archaeology of Guadeloupe

 

Following his appointment on May 25, 1972, as director of the archaeological district of Guadeloupe by the Ministry of Culture, Edgar Clerc (1915-1982), a pioneer of archaeological excavations in the archipelago and co-founder of the Guadeloupe Historical Society, bequeathed to the department in 1977 his archaeological collections, which he had presented at a major exhibition on the island in 1961, in order to eventually create an archaeological museum of Guadeloupe dedicated to local pre-Columbian cultures. He was appointed curator of the future museum on January 3, 1978, by the Ministry of Culture.

 

COLLECTION:

The museum's collections, initially constituted by the donation of Edgar Clerc, are entirely devoted to the archaeology of the pre-Columbian sites excavated on the island and to the objects discovered belonging to the Amerindian cultures that succeeded one another in the Guadeloupe archipelago: successively Huecoids, Saladoids, Troumassoids, Arawaks and Caribs. They bring together pottery, ritual and symbolic objects, ornaments and jewelry made of shell or stone and a large number of tool pieces (including polished axes) as well as explanations on the different sites of the island having petroglyphs (notably the Roches Gravées park in Trois-Rivières) or archaeological remains (burials, ritual sites etc.) and reproductions, in models, of Amerindian villages with the daily life associated with them (gardens, cultivation and preparation of cassava, crafts etc.)