One of the pleasures of being an American ­living in France is confronting time. Each culture has its own version of the past that leads irrevocably to the present. In France, the past is manifest in an enormous number of physical monuments identified with periods of time. People have lived in France and left some physical record of their lives for tens of thousands of years. There is nothing remarkable in that – the same sentence could be written about most places on earth. But France offers a unique mixture of opportunity and cultural imperative. Following the cultural revolutions of the nineteenth century, each new French state set about preserving what had been destroyed but not entirely demolished.

Inventing Bibracte The region of Burgundy is rich in monasteries and churches, the oldest surviving examples created 1000 years ago in a period now called Romanesque. Beneath this, in the chronological sense, is the Gallo-Roman layer, a Celtic culture aligned with the Roman world, another 1000 years older. A specific historic event markes the transition from the native culture the Romans called Gauls — a Celtic culture out of history that left no great physical monuments — to the culture called Gallo-Roman, with towns defined by roads, gates, temples and public works. In June of 52 B.C. the military force led by Julius Caesar, an army of Roman troops and tribal allies, completed a campaign against an alliance of tribes let by Vercingetorix. The Roman victory was recorded by the winning general in his native Latin in Commentarii de Bello Gallico, a text that became a primer for Latin students in what we now think of as the recent past, the 19th and 20th century world of “classical” education. Among the places mentioned in Caesar’s text are Alesia, where the Gaul forces were defeated, and ­Bibracte, their capitol which the ­Romans occu­pied. As Caesar famously wrote “he himself determined to winter at Bibracte” and perhaps it was there that he wrote or dictated the book that every Latin student has been forced to read ever since.

The identification with the Roman world among the people of the region eroded in the Christian centuries that followed. The king­doms that rose and fell around Burgundy counted Charlemagne and his descendants as their ancestors. For centuries, the French sense of time started in Biblical geography, leaped to the Roman world, never tired of disputes concerning the location of Mary ­Magdalene’s relics, and ended in the present, removing any profound interest in what lay beneath the ground under the ruins of villas, aqueducts and churches. The rebirth of the Gauls as a symbol of the French past is a recent layer, dating from the mid-19th century. The forces of nationalism in the Second Empire needed a symbol and the Gauls, though pre-Christian and famously defeated by the Romans, were reborn in the image of fierce warrior-ancestors, ready to take on the Huns of the North. In the same decades when an interest in carvings on the cave walls of the Dordogne valley was giving birth to the concept of pre-history, the young science of archaeology identified a hilltop near the village of Alise-Sainte­Reine as the site of the battle of Alesia. In 1865, Emperor ­Napoleon III had the site crowned with a statue of Vercingetorix sculpted by Aimé Millet on a base designed by Viollet-Le-Duc, the architect who re-created Gothic France. Vercingetorix is standing 7 meters (30 feet) tall, his hand on his sword.

But the location and nature of Vercingetorix’s capital was not so clear. According to Roman accounts, the town of Bibracte was abandoned within a generation following the conquest. The Celts had built their town on an igneous plateau, about 550 meters (1800 feet) above the river valley, surrounded by fortified walls. The Romans built their towns along rivers where they could make their roads. The population of Bibracte was removed to the new Roman town of Augustodunum along the river Arroux, now the modern city of Autun. Bibracte disappeared from all records for 1800 years. Then during the same period of Gothic Revival when Vercingetorix’s image appeared on the hilltop, two men “invented” Bibracte. In the 1860s Jacques-Gabriel Bulliot, a wine merchant in Autun, identified Mount Beuvray as the site. Bulliot then devoted the next forty years of his life to finding and cataloging objects at the site. Joseph Déchelette, his nephew, continued the work and wrote the first major manual of pre-historical, Celtic and Gallo-Roman archaeology. But work stopped after Déchelette’s early death in the cultural suicide of World War I.

Seventy years later, François Mitterand was Président de la République. In the 1950s Mitterand had been mayor of nearby Château­Chinon, and in the Orwell year of 1984 he declared the top of Mount Beuvray, now located in the Morvain Natural Park on the border between two administrative departments, a national monument. Contemporary archaeology of the site began in the 1990s, under European Union sponsorship. Unlike most archeological sites in France, which are controlled either by the State or local Regions, Bibracte is a European site with excavations carried out by university teams from many parts of Europe, north and south, east and west. The range of languages spoken by the students who sift through the soil each summer may resemble the cacophany of languages spoken by traders at the town markets several thousand years before.

The museum on the site, the Musée de la civilisation celtique, is an inspired and inspiring example of contemporary architecture fitting both its function and its environment. The building stretches along the area below the outer fortification wall, where the modern road crests the mountain and winds down on either side to villages below. Pierre-Louis Faloci designed a long three-story structure built into the hillside, with levels connected by steps both inside and outside the stone and glass walls. Light enters on both sides with clear views of the forest and nearby hills. The overall shape of the space echoes the excavations on the site above, where the earth has been opened in rectangular trenches covered by temporary roofs. The permanent exhibition tells the story of a Neolithic civilization that covered an area from the Danube to the Atlantic and moved trade goods of forged iron, pottery, woven cloth, and slaves from Iberia to the North Sea coast.

The Art of Marie-Nöelle Fontan From March through June 2006, an exhibition of Marie-Noëlle Fontan’s art shared space with models of Celtic towns, the statues of household gods, metal ornaments and explanations of pottery and weaving. To discover her sculpture for the first time in such as setting was a revelation. What Fontan does can be classified as “fiber art” because her primary technique is weaving. Previous major exhibitions at the Musée de la Chemiserie (Argen­ton-sur­Creuse, Musée de Charlieu and Palazzo Opesso (Chieri, Italy) have emphasized this aspect of her work. Her art has the flexibility of fabric. But the materials woven together with flax, cotton and copper thread are largely plant materials: twigs, stalks, moss, leaves, and seeds, as well as metal filaments. The pieces are all shapes and sizes. They hang in the air or rest against walls, are pressed within frames, rest on stands, and wind along the floor. Many of the pieces in the exhibition were made from the forest materials of Mount Beuvray. The eye recognizes hundreds of nut cases, dozens of bark, moss and twig fragments, arranged in chromatic patterns.

I thought of the nature démiurge insect collection of Jacques Kerchache, that vast range of beetles, scorpions, mantis, and moths impeccably mounted and arranged in chromatic rainbows. But that delicate and obsessive arrangement of pinned creatures, while it reveals a vast beauty of natural form, is not the same form of expression we find in Fontan. She selects and arranges plant materials. Yet the same principle of camouflage and formal transformation we see in the color and shape of forest insects appears in her wall hangings. That arrangement of twigs, lichen, and fabric invokes the physics of the insect world as much as it does the plant materials from which it is composed. The spine, whether vertebrate or invertebrate, is an organizing principal shared by all compositions alert to gravity. Fontan’s compositions — hanging, twisting, draping, and resting — are alert.

The presentation of this work in a museum that features “experimental archeology” — the reconstruction of furniture, woven cloth, and tools from daily life, based on excavated traces and fragments made from plant materials that have long since returned to earth — presents an illuminating setting for Fontan’s art. Fixed by the loom, we see the colors and forms of fragile plant materials. Her palatte is quite literally these ephemeral colors and textures. The regular geometry of the threads attaches the chaos of spines thrust from the seed cases.

How can the mind separate our visual response to the materials from the sculptural form of the work itself? We are not so distracted by the specific type of paint Rothko chose to make his colors from because we expect to care nothing about its chemistry or origin. In Fontan’s art the material is a major factor, familiar yet strange, recognizable but not so easy to place. While some of the work shown at Bibracte was made from local materials, Fontan’s materials are also drawn from Central America, where she lived for over a decade, as well as the urban parks and other parts of the French countryside.

There is a harmony with aspects of The Ephemeral Is Eternal, Wolfgang Laib’s retrospective presented at Fondation Beyeler (Basel) earlier this year. Among Laib’s major sculptures are Pollen, composed of grains gathered from hazelnut trees and dandelion plants. These works are re-created for each exhibition. As Laib explains, the color that glows before the human eye when millions of grains of pollen are arranged in enormous rectangles or conical piles is not a color he could mix. The same could be said of Fontan’s palette, which relies on the color of things themselves. It is a color revealed by the meticulous acts of gathering, accumulating and presenting. The sculptural form of Laib’s work focuses entirely on the geometry of religious ritual. In contrast to this approach, Fontan is neither intentionally ephemeral nor specifically religious. Her work will not disappear tomorrow, though it is not clear how long it will last. As I watched the woven vegetable paths move in the wind outside the walls of the museum at Bibracte, it was clear that the process of weaving seeds from the surrounding forest into art would not prevent them from returning to the soil again. Her formal reference is not human ritual. Her vegetable cloth is not made be worn. Her garden paths are not designed to be walked on.

It is difficult to capture the scale and three-dimensional nature of Fontan’s art in photographs. They are small and they are large. One wants to see the whole piece and the detail, the surface and the depth of texture. Some work is translucent, some opaque. A focus on the surface obscures its depth. Many are multiple woven pieces composed of many individual items, themselves arranged in groups.

In harmony with the architecture of the site, Fontan’s installation penetrates the transparent walls and links the inside and the outside of the space, bringing the forest in and returning it beyond the glass. Hanging from stone and concrete walls exposed to the forest wind, the hanging gardens are as ephemeral and persistent as the woods that will absorb them.