Maurice Reygasse
Maurice Reygasse
(1881-1965)
Philippe Bourgoin
Clément Germain Marie Maurice Reygasse was born in Lacapelle-Marival in the Lot department of France on January 7th 1881. He pursued his secondary studies in Toulouse and then in Paris, at the École des langues orientales and at the École pratique des hautes études, in the department of historical and philological studies. After obtaining his diplomas, he entered the colonial administration in Algeria, annexed by France at the time, and was stationed at N'Gaous, in the South-Constantine Province area, as an assistant administrator. He married there, and in 1911, he was appointed administrator of Tebessa. Together with his friend Marius Latapie (1875-1958), a gendarme and amateur archaeologist, he studied the prehistory of this region, and discovered an abundance of prehistoric lithic fragments and objects. They published the findings of their work in various scholarly journals.
Maurice Reygasse in his office
Reygasse also went on numerous exploratory expeditions around Touggourt, Ouargla and through the Grand Erg Oriental, and participated in the famous Logan Sahara Expedition, carried out in 1925-1926 by the Logan Museum of Anthropology in Beloit, Wisconsin. In the course of this Franco-American expedition, both ethnographic and archaeological in nature, the sumptuous sepulture of the Berber queen Tin Hinan was discovered eighty kilometers northwest of Tamanrasset.
Reygasse’s great pedagogical qualities gained him much recognition as a lecturer at the Faculty of Letters of Algiers. He also organized cycles of lectures and conferences in France and in many foreign countries. He was the founder and the first curator of the Museum of Prehistory and African Ethnography of Algiers to which he donated his collections. Like his colleagues in the French Prehistoric Society - Joseph Soulingeas (1859-1939) and Marius Archambault (1846-1920) - his interest also manifested itself through acquisitions he made in the fields of the natural sciences and, in particular, of New Caledonian ethnology, the archipelago having been, with the advent of its colonization by France, the site of intensive collecting activity beginning in the 1860s.
