Prehistory in the first half of the 20th century was a young science, particularly in Asia. In the French possessions, now contemporary Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia, methodical excavations and studies were rare before 1900, but started to become more significant in the 1920s and 1930s, exemplified by the work of Henry Mansuy, Madeleine Colani, Etienne Patte, and other officials of the Geological Survey of Indochina (GSI). Their fieldwork started to extend the museum’s survey, in which prehistory was partly represented. But this science wasn’t the main goal of the GSI and when their main protagonist had to retire from colonial duties, excavations and publications in prehistory weren’t maintained. At the end of the 1920s though, early prehistory started to be represented in the collections of the French school of the Far-East (FSFE) where, only neolithic or bronze age artifacts had previously been studied and displayed. This shift was driven by Madeleine Colani’s explorations from 1929 onwards, supported by FSFE, and a collection exchange policy of prehistoric materials brokered with other South-East Asian countries. This presentation, discusses the different ways prehistory of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was displayed and described by the SGI and the FSFE. Both institutions considered prehistory a marginal topic. The SGI tended to focus on human remains whilst the FSFE targeted artefacts, classification and comparison with typological series from other geographical regions.