or
centuries the leather industry and glove-making have
been essential factors of the economic development of the town
of Millau and the
surrounding plateaux. In Millau Museum you can learn about all
the stages in the transformation of rough skins into soft, fine
leather. This is the work of the tawers, using
age-old techniques combined with modern technology. Touch the smooth
kid skins made
from lambs bred on the Causses. Admire the craftmanship of the
glove-makers who cut, sew, embroider and decorate the different
parts of the glove. Machines and tools come to life (in summer
only) during demonstrations. You can see hundreds of different
models from the past and today made in Millau
for the most famous names of Haute Couture ; a witness to the art
of glove-making.
Don’t leave the museum without measuring your glove size....
Gallo-roman pottery
Men have lived on the Causses for thousands of years and
Millau Museum has a fine collection of vases, weapons, ornaments
found in tombs or caves or under dolmens.
In the first century
AD a gallo-roman settlement grew up at the confluence of
the Tarn and the Dourbie rivers. In one part of this
ancient city, La Graufesenque, 600 potters were making hundreds
and thousands of vases that they fired in huge kilns. This
luxury tableware, made of red terracotta and generally
decorated and signed by the artist was exported
to the whole of the Roman Empire.
Beside this evidence of industrial activities you will
also find vestiges of everyday-life in Gallo-roman
days,
their religion,
their funeral rites. A lead tablet bears the longest text
in gallo-roman yet found ; a prayer from a group
of women to a
druidess who has died.
Geology show cases
The Grands Causses and their surroundings
bear a wealth of fossils and Millau Museum offers a
complete collection of these. Earth from the end of the Primary Age
has surrendered a great variety of footprints of reptiles
and amphibians. The sediments of the Jurassic Age
sea have
revealed dinosaur footprints and numerous fossils : ammonites,
nautilus, belemnites, fish, ichtyosaurus...
It is in these same layers of earth that the first
complete elasmosaurus to be discovered in France
was found. This marine reptile, 180million years old, was
found at Tournemire, near
Roquefort (Aveyron).
4 meters long, it has a flat head, a long snake-like neck
and the body of a large fish or sea-mammal, with feet like
flippers.
During the Quartenary period, 2 million years ago, in the
valleys that were being formed, limestone deposits fossilised
the remains of plants.
Some caves have revealed impressive bones of rhinocerous,
hyena, mammoth, bears , aurochs and hippopotamus.
or
centuries the leather industry and glove-making have
been essential factors of the economic development of the town
of Millau and the
surrounding plateaux. In Millau Museum you can learn about all
the stages in the transformation of rough skins into soft, fine
leather. This is the work of the tawers, using
age-old techniques combined with modern technology. Touch the smooth
kid skins made
from lambs bred on the Causses. Admire the craftmanship of the
glove-makers who cut, sew, embroider and decorate the different
parts of the glove. Machines and tools come to life (in summer
only) during demonstrations. You can see hundreds of different
models from the past and today made in Millau
for the most famous names of Haute Couture ; a witness to the art
of glove-making.
Don’t leave the museum without measuring your glove size....
