“I had the misfortune of not thinking like the powerful, of not adhering to their opinions, or their orders. This was the full extent of my crime." Pierre Vaux, Cayenne, 16th August 1858. In February 1848, revolution broke out once again in Paris; King Louis-Philippe abdicated and left France. The Second Republic...

On the site We went to meet Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha on site. The two archaeologists from the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research in Amapá (IEPA) were busy excavating. Beneath the shelter of a large tent, they were unearthing a ditch where bits of pottery...

"Crowned mountain is the name given by the Saramacas to these relics which are hard to explain". This phrase, written by in 1952, was Emile Abonnenc’s first observation about the enigmatic presence of three of these sites in French Guiana. The highly evocative term reveals the incomprehension of some of the...

Beyond the mangrove forests, vast savannahs which are flooded with the turning of the seasons, lies the Guiana coastline, stretching nearly 1600km from the mouth of the Amazon to the Orinoco delta. This low-lying and apparently uniform strip of coast reveals some of its particularities only from a few metres...

A few kilometres upstream from the town of Saint-Georges-de-l’Oyapock , a series of events relating to the recent pre-Colombian history of the Guianas have been brought to light by excavations being carried out by the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Institut national de recherches archéologiques preventives, INRAP), directed...