The memory of the land

Picardie is a mysterious region. And yet those who seek to know it come to realise that it is quite happy to share its secrets. Closer and more accessible than you might think - Amiens is an hour and a half’s drive from Paris -, it shares its time, its memories, its treasures, and great and inquisitive men have found success there. At the initiative of Jacques Boucher de Perthes first of all, Picardie began revealing its secrets in 1844. He was followed by Victor Commont (1866-1918) and more recently Roger Agache, the inventor of aerial archaeology. Since 1960, on board private aircraft and microlights, he has detected hundreds of relics and has enabled a rich buried heritage to be brought into the modern day: “It appears that agriculture destroyed and levelled everything, and it’s this same agriculture that is bringing everything back to life as if by miracle, thanks to the growth anomalies of cereals in the summer months and the anomalies of ground colours in the winter due to humidity.” His immense capacity for work, impressive scientific rigour and inexhaustible passion have profoundly changed prospecting techniques and have served as the starting point for numerous excavations and preservation measures. His campaigns have enabled more than 10,000 archaeological sites to be detected, including Roman villas such as the Thiepval villa in Somme or the Vendeuil-Caply villa in Oise, a site that revealed the presence of thermae, a temple and a large theatre on a 130-hectare site, in addition to a huge rural sanctuary of Roman Gaul in Ribemont-sur-Ancre.

All of Picardie’s treasures are carefully kept and exhibited in a number of museums and are waiting to be discovered on a weekend visit. There is the Musée de Picardie in Amiens, of course, dubbed “the little Louvre”, as well as museums in Senlis, Soissons and Noyon, where Gallic-Roman relics and a bronze-age collection are a must-see. For children, there is the Breteuil museum and its ‘workshops’, where children carry out “excavations just like the grown-ups”. There are also parks dedicated to archaeology. In Chaussée-Tirancourt, Samara traces 600,000 years of history over 30 hectares in the Somme Valley, while the Saint-Acheul archaeological garden in Amiens produced the first ‘acheuléen’ cut flint, taking its name from the area where it was found.

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