Glozel

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Glozel (46°02′N 3°36′E) is a hamlet in central France, part of the commune of Ferrières-sur-Sichon, Mayet de Montagne, Allier, some 17 km from Vichy.

From 1924 to 1930, a total of some 3,000 artifacts, variously dated to Neolithic, Iron Age and Medieval times were unearthed, including clay tablets, sculptures and vases, some of them inscribed with letters.

The finds initiated a series of claims and counterclaims among French archaeologists. Some regarded the items as authentic, while others concluded the items were hoaxes.

1 Discovery and Excavation
2 Dating
3 Glozel tablets
4 Glozel affair
5 Literature
6 External links

[edit] Discovery and Excavation

The initial discovery was made by Émile Fradin, at the time aged 17, and his grandfather Claude Fradin, on 1 March 1924. Émile was holding the handles of a plow when one of the cows pulling it stuck her foot in a cavity. Freeing the cow, the Fradins uncovered a cavity with walls of clay bricks and 16 clay floor tiles, containing human bones and ceramic fragments.

Adrienne Picandet, a local teacher, after visiting the Fradins' farm in March informed the Minister of Education. On July 9, another teacher, Benoit Clément, visited the Fradins representing the Societé d'Emulation du Bourbonnais, later returning with a man called Viple. Clément and Viple used pickaxes to break down the remaining walls, which they took away with them. Later, Émile Fradin received a letter by Viple identifying the site as Gallo-Roman. The January issue of the Bulletin de la Societé d'Emulation du Bourbonnais mentioned the finds, alerting Antonin Morlet, a Vichy physician and amateur archaeologist. Morlet visited the farm on 26 April, offering 200 francs to be allowed to complete the excavation. Morlet began his excavations on 24 May, 1925, discovering tablets, idols and bone and flint tools and engraved stones. Morlet identified the site as Neolithic in a report entitled Nouvelle Station Néolithique published in September 1925, Émile Fradin as co-author. Two other tombs were uncovered in 1927. More excavations were performed in April 1928. After 1942, a new law outlawed private excavations, and the site remained untouched until the Ministry of Culture in 1983 re-opened excavations. The full report was never published, but a 13 page summary appeared in 1995. The authors suggest that the site is medieval, possibly containing some Iron Age objects, but was likely enriched by forgeries. Since 1999, a group of scholars organized by René Germain is holding a yearly colloque about Glozel in Vichy.

[edit] Dating

Glass found at Glozel was dated spectrographically in the 1920s, and again in the 1990s at the Slowpoke Reactor at Toronto University by neutron activation analysis. Both analyses place the glass fragments in the medieval period.

Alice and Sam Gerard together with Robert Liris in 1995 managed to have two bone tubes found in Tomb II C-14 dated at the AMS C-14 laboratory at the University of Arizona, finding a 13th century date.

Thermoluminescence dating of Glozel pottery in 1974 confirmed that the pottery was not produced recently. By 1979, 39 TL dates on 27 artifacts separated the artifacts into three groups: the first between 300 BC and AD 300 (Celtic and Roman Gaul), the second medieval, centered on the 13th century, and the third recent. TL datings of 1983 performed in Oxford range from the 4th century to the medieval period.

Carbon-14 datings of bone fragments range from the 13th to the 20th century. Three C-14 analyses performed in Oxford in 1984 dated a piece of charcoal to the 11th to 13th century, and a fragment of an ivory ring to the 15th century. A human femur was dated to the 5th century.

[edit] Glozel tablets

Some 100 ceramic tablets bearing inscriptions are among the artefacts found at Glozel. The inscriptions are on average on six or seven lines, mostly on a single side, although some specimens are inscribed on both faces. The tablet inscriptions are reminiscent of the Phoenician alphabet. There were numerous claims of decipherment, including identification of the language of the inscriptions as Basque, Chaldean, Eteocretan, Hebrew, Iberian, Latin, Berber, Ligurian, Phoenician and Turkic [1] [2] [3].

Hans-Rudolf Hitz (1982) suggests a Celtic reading and dates the inscriptions to between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century AD, suggesting a Gaulish dialect. He counts 25 signs, augmented by some 60 variations and ligatures. Hitz hypothesizes that the alphabet was influenced by the Lepontic alphabet of Lugano, itself descended from the Etruscan alphabet, reading some Lepontic proper names like Setu (Lepontic Setu-pokios), Attec (Lepontic Ati, Atecua), Uenit (Lepontic Uenia), Tepu (Lepontic Atepu). Hitz even claims discovery of the toponym Glozel itself, as nemu chlausei "in the sacred place of Glozel" (comparing nemu to Gaulish nemeton).

[edit] Glozel affair

French archaeological academia was dismissive of Morlet's 1925 report, published by an amateur and a peasant boy. Morlet invited a number of archaeologists to visit the site during 1926, including Salomon Reinach, curator of the National Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, who spent three days excavating. Reinach confirmed the authenticity of the site in a communication to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres. Similalry, famous archaeologist Abbé Breuil excavated with Morlet and was impressed with the site, but on 2 October, Breuil wrote that "everything is false except the stoneware pottery."

At the meeting of the International Institute of Anthropology in Amsterdam, held in September 1927, Glozel was the subject of heated controversy. A commission was appointed for further investigation, arriving at Glozel on 5 November 1927. During their three day excavation campaign, the archaeologists were observed by spectators, who were by now flocking to the site, as finding various artefacts, but in their report of December 1927, the commission declared everything at Glozel with the exception of a few pieces of flint axes and stone ware as a fake. René Dussaud, curator at the Louvre and famous epigrapher, also accused Émile Fradin of forgery. On 10 January 1927, Fradin filed suit for defamation against Dussaud.

The president of the French Prehistoric Society Felix Regnault visited Glozel on 24 February, and after briefly visiting the small museum filed a complaint of fraud. The police under the direction of Regnault on the next day searched the museum, destroyed glass display cases and confiscated three cases of artifacts. On February 28th the suit against Dussaud was postponed due to Regnault's pending indictment against Fradin.

A new group of neutral archaeologists, called the Committee of Studies, appointed by scholars who were uncomfortable with these happenings, excavated from 12 to 14 April 1928. They found more artifacts and in their report asserted the authenticity of the site, which they identified as Neolithic.

Gaston-Edmond Bayle, chief of the Criminal Records Office in Paris analyzed the confiscated artifacts and in a report identified them as recent forgeries, and on 4 June 1929, Émile Fradin was indicted for fraud on the basis of Bayle's report, but the verdict was reverted by an appeal court in April 1931. The defamation charge against Dussaud came to trial in March 1932, and Dussaud was found guilty of defamation.

[edit] Literature

André Cherpillod, Glozel et l'écriture préhistorique (1991), ISBN 2-906134-15-5
Émile Fradin, Glozel et ma vie (Les Énigmes de l'univers), R. Laffont (1979), ISBN 2-221-00284-9
Alice Gerard, Glozel : Bones of Contention (2005), ISBN 0-595-67067-9
Alice Gerard, Glozel (2005) ASIN B0007QAAM0
Hans-Rudolf Hitz, Als man noch protokeltisch sprach: Versuch einer Entzifferung der Inschriften von Glozel, Juris (1982), ISBN 3-260-04914-2
Marie Labarrère-Delorme, La Colombe de Glozel: Propositions pour une lecture des inscriptions de Glozel, M. Labarrère-Delorme (1992) ISBN 2-9504632-1-5
Nicole Torchet , L'Affaire de Glozel, Copernic (1978), ISBN 2-85984-021-4