Breuil, Henri

Related Category: Archaeology: Biographies

(äNrē´ brö´yə), known as Abbé Breuil(äbā´), 1877–1961, French archaeologist, paleontologist, and cleric. He taught at the Institut de paléontologie humaine, Paris, after 1910. During much of his lifetime, Breuil was considered the foremost authority on Paleolithic cave art. He copied and published hundreds of examples of rock carvings and paintings from Europe and Africa and advanced the first well-informed interpretations of the significance of prehistoric art. His principal work is Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art (tr. 1952).

See biography by A. H. Brodrick (1963).