Oise

Forty million years ago, the arm of a warm sea stretched out here, populated by mollusks and aquatic plants, stirred up by currents that distributed them according to their strength on the irregular bottom, compacted by the ages into a chalky mass.

For two thousand years, quarrymen and women have been extracting this limestone, a building stone, to build farms, houses, churches and Paris. A hard work delivering to the city its material block by block, leaving in the landscape huge cavities where many have left their skin. Others come back in the evening with their pockets full of fossils, witnesses of an antediluvian life.

It is said of a stone that shows traces of fossilized life that it is awake. This book operates an iconographic section in the quarries of the Oise. It compiles old and current views that show how prehistoric life has left traces in the rock and how its extraction has marked lives.

Jacques Michel Coupé tells the story of this oceanic soil in 1805,
Baptiste Gaillard describes in turn this mineral low time,
Simon Boudvin photographs the Oise, its documents and its quarries,
Stéphane Dupont arranges this material in a compact volume.