[1] Born 13 August 1905 in Fribourg, Switzerland, she was the daughter of the French geographer Jean Brunhes, She accompanied him from an early age in his fieldwork and participated in his research work.
[4] In 1927, at the age of 22, she traveled to Canada with her father, developing a narrative of human geography and ethnology together.
The trip became the subject of a documentary about Mariel written and directed by her son, Jean-Noël Delamarre, based on his discovery of unpublished film and photographic evidence of the "unusual collaboration between two geographers, one confirmed: the father, the other budding, his daughter."
[5] In 1957 Mariel was put in charge of the mission of the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions, and she became a research associate at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in 1958.
She then wrote a thesis in ethnography under the direction of the anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan, which she defended in 1966.