Musee d'Archeologie Nationale

Took advantage of the first warm (over 10 C) sunny day in several weeks to take the older girls to the Musée d'Archeologie Nationale at St Germain en Laye, a former royal palace and Louis XIV's main residence until Versailles was completed. It was subsequently the residence of the Stuart kings in exile (Bonnie Prince Charlie and his ilk), and now houses the main collection of archeological objects directly related to France covering the period from the earliest prehistorique artefacts to a large collection of Gallo-Roman pieces of all size, shapes and uses housed in the former Royal apartments. It is also less than 15 minutes drive from home and was not at all crowded so...score! It even held the girls attention for over an hour before they started to complain of boredom and their desperate need for ice cream.
The highlight for me was the collection of late paleolithic and early neolithic carvings, all incredibly intricate and beautiful objects as well as being uniformly small. Perhaps because they came from a hunter-gatherer society perpetually on the move and thus the transportation of any non-essential large objects was problematic.
Pride of place amongst the exhibits in this section goes to the "Dame de Brassempouy", though I am pretty sure what we was on display is a copy and not the original piece. It is tiny - less than 3.5 cm high, and part of a larger collection of "Venus" figurines

There is abundant room to speculate why these earliest representations of human figures were exclusively female and highly stylized, in contrast to the animal carvings from the same era (example of a bison below) which are often faithfully life like.

My other interesting takeaway was the extent to which the Gaulish tribes conquered by the Romans incorporated the latters divinities into their existing ones, with numerous examples of statues where a familiar Roman god (Mercury, Apollo, Bacchus for example) was depicted attired in clothing typical of a local inhabitant and had co-opted the name of his or her local equivalent.