Although I've sat on this promotional text for a documentary about my efforts to unravel the mysteries, scandals and contradictions surrounding Glozel for decades, I've finally decided to share it with the public because my efforts to use it to find funding have come to nought.
It now serves as the first in a series of revelations that I hope to publish as I tidy up loose ends.
I hope you enjoy the detective story, which I wrote while protagonists like Emile Fradin were still alive and I was still finding clues.
Ever since artifacts were found in the hamlet of Glozel near Vichy in 1924, the site has been the biggest cans of worms in world archeology. The can of worms has now grown so huge that it contains roughly 2,630 objects from the Champ Duranthon - which was quickly re-named the Field of the Dead - plus 20 others from nearby ring tunnels and the extensive tunnels themselves! Some of the most famous archeologists of the past, including the director of the French National Museum of Antiquities, Salmon Reinach, saw their reputations ruined by defending the site’s authenticity and our film will document that recent researchers who have produced data that flies in the face of conventional wisdom may have preferred to bury it rather than risk their own.
On the other hand, we experienced how anyone who is perceived as criticizing Glozel in its own region is still harassed when a mob drowned out our microphone and a proprietor expelled us from his restaurant for interviewing a shunned local anti-Glozelian. The feud has gone on so long and the quarrel has grown so intense, that you would think it impossible to unravel.
Yet there is hope. Following clues from labs in Clermont-Ferrand and Oxford to the depths of newly discovered tunnels, we have pried secret after secret from living witnesses who have led us to purposely concealed megalithic structures at Glozel itself, hidden archaeomagnetic data, recently discovered Glozelian objects that open new paths for analysis, and a twist ending. It turns out everyone was wrong.
But first, why has the controversy burned for 80 years?
Shortly after 3 generations of the Fradin family, including 17 year old Emile Fradin, who is still alive, claimed to have found the artifacts while clearing land on March 1, 1924, mainstream archeologists were accusing Emile and his friend Dr. Morlet, a Vichy doctor who had paid for the exclusive right to excavate the site, of perpetrating a monstrous hoax. Debate ossified along lines set by the limits of knowledge in the 1920s: according to “Glozelians” the site had to be prehistoric – in fact, the pivotal discovery between the “reindeer” age of the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic: to top it off, they thought it had even given birth to the alphabet.
For prehistorians steeped in the sequences found in the Dordogne’s well-stratified and carefully dated sites this was sacrilegious nonsense – and still is. For students of the evolution of the Linear A and Linear B scripts of the Middle East into our alphabet, Glozel’s pretensions contradicted common sense and their lifework.
Dr. Morlet (foreground) & Emile Fradin shortly after the “discovery”
Consequently, most archeologists came to believe that Glozel was nothing more than a fraud that took advantage of the false expectation in the 20s that the Paleolithic led directly to the Neolithic. Glozel’s mix of animal engravings and bone artifacts suggestive of the Paleolithic with the Neolithic’s hallmark, pottery, made Glozel look at the time like the perfect missing link. But when the real link, the Mesolithic, was finally discovered, it turned out to have separated the two periods by millennia and its abstract art, microlithic tools and complete lack of pottery were so unlike anything in the Glozelian assemblage, that the case against the Fradins’ site seemed closed: it had obviously been a well-tailored scam.
But, then, why the loose ends? For example, why did scientists and Glozel’s defenders alike argue that its animal sculptures and engravings had to be Paleolithic – if they were anything - when there is not a single bison, mammoth, wooly rhino or any of the other fauna typical of the Ice Age? Except for some deer, that could just as easily be red deer like ones that live in the area today, instead of reindeer, every other animal - from badgers to rabbits - is clearly a temperate species. What if scientists and Glozelians alike seized upon the wrong paradigm and missed better explanations?
LIFTING THE CURSE OF
GLOZEL
© 2003 Duncan Caldwell
Glozel
If they did, it was because the adversaries locked horns from the start – and haven’t been able to extricate themselves from preconceptions ever since. Dr. Morlet claimed that the controversy began after he’d invited the most famous prehistorian of the time, Joseph-Louis Capitan, to contribute a preface to Morlet’s site report. According to Morlet, Capitan had been bowled over by the discovery after digging beside him in June 1925, but had demanded to be known as the report’s sole author, offering only to acknowledge Morlet’s help. When Morlet refused to give away credit for his manuscript, Capitan supposedly warned that he’d do everything in his power to undermine it.
For one reason or another, he did, and the debate among archeologists began to polarize the community. In 1927, an International Commission was convened to settle the storm. With so many of the world’s leading prehistorians participating, the French press and public waited in suspense for the verdict. The atmosphere was already so envenomed that the prehistorians even powdered the excavation façade with plaster to stop anyone from inserting forgeries during the night. But turning the table at dawn on the third day, Dr. Morlet and a bailiff he’d brought along ambushed one of them, Dorothy Garrod - thinking that they’d caught her planting a fake behind the plaster to discredit him! All trust was lost between Glozelians and the research community.
The International Commission including Denis Peyrony and Dorothy Garrod digging with Dr. Morlet on the 2nd of 3 ill-fated days
Between January 1928 and June 1929, six suits and counter suits were launched. On the one hand, Fradin was sued by the head of the French Prehistorical Society for defrauding the public by selling admission to see fakes in the museum he’d installed in the family livingroom. But he counter-attacked by suing the Society and a universally acclaimed prehistorian, Denis Peyrony, for defamation. Le Mercure, one of the leading French magazines of the Twenties, led the charge on behalf of the Fradins by presenting Emile as a down-to-earth farmer martyred by hypocritical and jealous mandarins in Paris who were out to preserve their theories or co-opt his finds.
The museum looks much the same today as here, in 1929
Headlines were made around the world and the press and public rapidly took sides. Hundreds of period cartoons show how widely and even internationally the scandal influenced popular culture.
This is great! As if we didn’t have enough subjects to argue about in France, the Glozelians and Anti-Glozelians are fighting again!
And now all of Europe is in an up-roar over Glozel. Do we have to call upon the League of Nations to re-establish peace between Glozelians and Anti-Glozelians?
Illustration, January 28, 1928
Whatever the truth was, the site’s notoriety attracted international hordes to the small museum. Martyrdom was excellent for business and Emile was soon able to pay cash for a large convertible while his neighbors were buying bicycles from Manufrance on credit.
Emile Fradin in his car
Fradin became a local legend, the hero whose cow had stumbled through a tomb roof onto the equivalent of a pot of gold. In the hope of finding troves to open their own museums, surrounding villagers began emptying the region’s odd ring-shaped tunnels. But with the exception of contested finds found in 3 nearby ring-tunnels, these digs came up empty.
Although one might have expected neighbors to be envious, the entire population of the surrounding Montagne Bourbonnais closed ranks around the Fradins when the establishment resorted to raiding and threatening the family. The debate became so tinged with the ancient rivalry between the capital and provinces that the government actually became schizophrenic. As recently as June 13, 1974, the region’s top archeologist, the great prehistorian and analyst of Paleolithic “venuses”, Henri Delporte, sent a letter threatening Emile if he let foreign physicists take samples. On the other hand, a letter from President Chirac that hangs in the Fradins’ museum calls him the discoverer of the most important French archeological finds of the 20th century - proving that politicians still feel they must pay court to Emile to ensure popularity in the region, even as archeologists working under them loathe the man.
Instead of settling the lawsuits and town vs. country quarrel, the first lab tests only exacerbated the degrading situation. In 1929, Edmond Bayle, the Director of the French National Forensic Laboratory in Paris, testifying on behalf of the Society, appeared to close the case against Glozel with a magisterial display of jargon and authority. The clincher was his claim to have found a modern root and lint when he dissolved the pottery.
But the Glozel plot has never been that simple.
Shortly after the damning testimony, a mysterious visitor came to Glozel. As he was leaving, he made a cryptic announcement: “Take a good look at me,” he asked Fradin, “I came here to decide for myself if Glozel is a hoax and now that I’ve seen the objects, I’m persuaded that they are real. In a few weeks you’ll see my face on the front page of the papers.”
On September 16, 1929, the man had made headlines by shooting Bayle to death in broad daylight at the National Courthouse in Paris.
“Drama at the National Courts: M. Bayle, the Scientific Director of the Judicial Identity Service shot to death by a madman”
The culprit, Joseph-Emile Philippeonet, had been out on bail during appeal after being convicted of another murder – a conviction, he said, based on evidence fabricated by the chief. “If I’m going to be sentenced for murder,” he cried, “then I want to be condemned for a real one – of a person who deserved to die!”
Strangely enough, it is now known that the forensic chief’s methods were indeed falsified when he gave evidence against Glozel. What’s worse, Bayle’s bad science set a precedent for decades of contempt towards the site among researchers.
The death in 1932 of Salomon Reinach, director of the National Museum of Antiquities, robbed Glozel of its last well-placed defender. From then on, the sulphurous problem was allowed to wither away. Prehistorians had thrown up their hands, convinced that the site was such an outrageous hoax and perpetual can of worms that they were just making a mockery of themselves and wasting limited budgets by paying further attention to it. Worse yet, from their point of view, any criticism of Glozel seemed to play into Morlet and Fradin’s hands in a sordid quest for notoriety and profit.
Reinach’s posthumous demotion to an archeological laughing-stock was just collateral damage.
The Director of the National Museum of Antiquities, Salomon Reinach, overseeing the excavation on April 13, 1928
Given the antagonism and then, worse, condescending indifference, Morlet and the Fradins decided to stop the dig in 1936 and hunker down for at least 50 years until an unborn generation of archeologists were ready to “treat the site fairly.” Symptomatic of each side’s attitude was the fact that Morlet recorded that he’d specifically left several areas untouched so neutral archeologists could eventually decide on the site’s importance for themselves, while many archeologists still claim that it isn’t worth trying to excavate because Morlet dug from one side of the field to the other, laying waste to the site and destroying any chance of making sense of Glozel later. According to such anti-Glozelians, Morlet supposedly failed to respect the basic rule of leaving “witness areas” because his crew used the same digging technique – shoveling at a trench face and throwing tailings behind them - as they’d used in warfare at Verdun. The implication was, “What more could you expect from frauds and gullible, shell-shocked amateurs?”
Finally, though, it seemed that enough time had past and technological progress been made to re-open the case. In 1958, while carbon 14 dating was still in its infancy, Morlet tried to use it to vindicate his lifework. And the thought of checking Glozel also occurred to certain scientists – especially foreign ones. In 1973, a Danish physicist, Vagn Mejdahl, persuaded French, English and Scottish colleagues to join him in performing independent TL tests both on pieces from the museum and freshly found objects. But the dates clustered around the Iron Age and Dark Ages, satisfying nobody since they didn’t fit their paradigms of prehistoric vs. modern.
In 1976, a Scottish researcher, Hugh McKerrell, performed a carbon 14 test but had to mix samples from 15 objects because the technology was still so young that it required a huge quantity of bone. From today’s perspective his overly broad (and, unfortunately, highly destructive) test has no validity.
The Grenoble Center for Nuclear Studies performing geophysical studies
at the Champ des Morts in Oct. 1974
All the same, the result - 17,000 BP - astounded the world. Foreigners such as Oxford’s lab technicians and French particle physicists, neither of whom had much to fear from the hierarchical French archeological establishment, for which Glozel was still beneath contempt, saw Glozel as a mystery they alone might be able to solve and the perfect challenge which would allow them to calibrate budding technologies.
But the results were all over the map. What’s worse, Glozel’s soil and objects turned out to be dosed with zircon and other radioactive minerals which throw off dating.
To top it off, Glozel still seemed to be haunted by its “Spirit” – the nickname given to the supposed faker of the 20s. One morning during the 83/84 winter survey the new excavators found half of a “lamp” planted in earth that the physicists in 74 had checked before putting the tailings back into their trench on top of a plastic tarp. Worse still, the archeologists found the lamp’s other half lying in the frost-covered grass in front of their tent, where the Spirit had apparently dropped and lost it in the dark. To top it off, the two halves even had modern polyvinyl acetate glue on them – apparently telltale evidence of a pathetic attempt to fool them. Although the researchers were tactful, praising the Fradins’ welcome and openness to researchers, the much delayed preliminary report in 1995 (promising a compendious report that would never appear) was scathing between the lines. Morlet had died. So had a blacksmith from across the valley who had offered to sell Morlet Glozelian artifacts, making the blacksmith and his forge suspects in any forgery, but Fradin was alive. The implication was therefore clear: Emile could be the Spirit.
But the very results that seemed to finally confirm deceit, actually raised a problem that was almost impossible to explain away. At first glance a bizarre gap between thermo-luminescence (TL) dates taken from different parts of the same face pot and other ceramic objects looked like more evidence of fraud. Indeed, the discrepancies were brandished by Glozel’s detractors as the smoking gun itself. Obviously, they argued, the pottery didn’t give consistent dates because it had been reconstituted from a mishmash of ancient shards ground up and turned back into clay by someone trying to fool TL analysts.
An inscribed face pot with a forked symbol akin to hermaphroditic sculptures consisting of a vulva between legs and a penis/trunk
But not so fast! TL tests only tell the date of the most recent firing and can be corrupted by later firings or radioactivity. Many of the objects from the front of the coffers had been covered in glass slag, suggesting that the mouth of the coffer had been used as a glass-maker’s furnace at some time after the ceramics had been put deep inside. Indeed, Hugh McKerrell used neutron activation analysis to test the slag’s composition and found that it was unique to the Middle Ages. What was Medieval slag doing all over supposed 20th century fakes?
Making it even more problematic, pottery which is not fired to 800° C can re-soften in wet soil. Reports from the 20s mention that several ceramic objects were so pulpy when they were found in damp earth that they were immediately placed by the Fradin’s fireplace to re-solidify them. The differing dates could simply prove that a pot had been deeper in the coffer and re-heated directionally by later glass making or that one side had been closer to the Fradins’ fire. In either case, the older date from the pot’s shielded side would be the least corrupted and closer to the original date of manufacture. And that wasn’t even taking into account the possibility of contamination by charcoal pits and stump burning. The very evidence against Glozel made one wonder whether its pottery at least might be authentic.
This was especially true because the detractors’ argument that someone had ground up shards to trick TL testers was so lame: how could anyone in the 1920s have been clairvoyant enough to try to trick a test that wasn’t even imagined until the mid-50s!
Then there were 2 telltale tests that nobody had thought of performing: first, counting tracks left by particles from super-novas in the single glass object which was definitely Glozelian, a knobby “bobine” bearing Glozelian symbols. The test had been just as unimaginable as TL in the 20s and took advantage of the fact that glass preserves traces of highly charged cosmic particles which bombard the earth at a constant rate.
The glass “bobine” with 2 Glozelian symbols
And, secondly, microscopic observation to check if micashist particles on pottery surfaces are still oriented. The 1983 researchers and many of the scientists we interviewed suggested that the “Spirit” may have carved some of the objects out of ceramic blocks such as Gallo-Roman roof tiles fired thousands of years before the modern carving.
Although we thought Glozel might well be fake, this argument again surprised us with its apparent bad faith: most of the ceramic objects were so large that the forger would have had to find dozens of fired blocks as big as refrigerators! Why hadn’t researchers simply checked to see if mica on the surfaces remained in the orientation a potter’s hands had given it before firing since the test would instantly show whether a later sculptor had carved objects and removed their original surfaces?
There were enough loose ends, signs of poor science and things we could check when it came just to fired objects – leaving the bones for round 2 - that it seemed worth investigating. If the pots were forgeries, so be it – that would be our story – if not, which only meant that they had to be older than the 20th century, then we could unveil an unknown culture in the heart of the most archeologically trodden country on earth.
At first the Fradins and the administrator of their museum, Joseph Grivel, greeted us with cordial reserve. After so many lawsuits and ridicule, the Fradin’s were gun-shy. The last documentary on Glozel had interwoven an interview with a New-Age “psycho-historian” theorizing that stone rings from the Champ des Morts had been slipped around phalluses to ritually retard ejaculation with another shot super-imposing a peristaltic beam of the “ejaculatory rings” shooting towards the buttocks of Fradin’s daughter, Jacqueline, as she bicycled away with yet more footage showing the region’s top archeologists mocking Fradin for perpetrating a laughable hoax by finding a “limp-dick culture.” One of them, Jean-Paul Demoule, was condescending: “The study of fakes is very interesting. Just like authentic objects, they teach us a great deal about the era when they were made.” The other, Jean-Pierre Daugas, was categorical: “We have done our work as experts and eliminated any ambiguity.” Case closed.
No wonder the Fradins felt so burned by the way their earlier hospitality had been betrayed that it took days of pre-interviews, prying at every hint to get the first slip: the most impressive of all owl-face pots hadn’t been found in the original digs.
Then when? Grivel was evasive. It took more hours to get him to let down his guard again. But, finally, warily, he answered: in 1963.
That late! The digs had been over for nearly 30 years! How did he and Jean-Claude know?
It was Jean Claude’s turn to squirm: they just knew.
How?
Well, if we must know, he said shyly, he’d found it himself.
He and Jacqueline had been trying their own hand at excavating when they found the tall pot propped by the entrance of a tunnel hewn into a buried rock face. The entrance was filled with dirt and they hadn’t gone in, since they thought their father, Emile, would be overjoyed by their vindicating discoveries and would help them dig it out. But when they excitedly showed him the pot, Emile had exploded – promptly swearing them to silence and backfilling the hole to hide the tunnel and a megalithic slab lying in front of it. Fradin wasn’t going to make the mistake of being disturbed a second time by either rabid archeologists or treasure hunters.
Somewhere down in the Champ des Morts the tunnel apparently still lay unexplored.
The vase found by the Fradin children in the Sixties
The researchers in 83 had been too patronizing and connected to mentors who had already tormented or publicly criticized the Fradins to be entrusted with such information. But 67 years had elapsed and we were foreigners. More importantly, our search was technical and unimpeded by deadlines, unlike those of hundreds of science journalists over the years who’d interviewed the Fradins and Grivel for an hour and gone away with pat answers and reinforced preconceptions. Once we knew about the finds, we were not going to give up, so, eventually, Jean-Claude even showed us the tunnel’s exact spot.
One admission led to another: the precise location of the witness areas. Then, to top it off, the Fradins and Grivel confided that there were indications that 5 similar sites lay under a feuding neighbor’s land.
Finally, Grivel even divulged that he’d recently found an artifact himself – a broken hermaphroditic “idol” exposed while he and Jean-Claude were up-rooting over-growth around one of the structures excavated by Morlet.
Given such scoops, it became all the more important to perform the tests, and re-check the scientific data.
Grivel’s broken hermaphroditic sculpture found in the winter of 1998/99
The next breakthrough came from the most surprising source - one of the authors of the long-delayed 1995 report on the very 83/84 winter studies that had damned Glozel: Didier Miallier, a researcher at the Laboratory of Corpuscular Physics in Clermont-Ferrand. Not being an archeologist, he was somewhat autonomous from the other authors. Surprisingly, he also had the most extensive knowledge of the actual artifacts, since he’d performed the only modern inventory. His interview answers describing archaeomagnetic readings taken at Glozel and reiterating the evidence against the site hardly prepared us for what happened once he was off camera: first he confessed that some of his colleagues had stooped to unethical levels to bury Glozel, then he impishly handed us a slip of paper, saying, “Contact these men: they are reliable and have TL evidence that Glozel is real.”
We had our own Deep Throat!
The first name was Martin Aitkin, former head of the Oxford Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art. Making sense of Glozel had been a mini-crusade of his since the problem of its erratic dates had to be resolved to make sure that the dating methods themselves weren’t off. An error at Glozel could mean that accepted dates elsewhere could be wrong too. Strangely enough, he’d performed archaeomagnetism tests to see how local radioactivity may have effected the TL tests – but he’d never published the results even though they were the most recent! He wasn’t alone: the preliminary report on the 83/84 studies had only been published in 95 and the full report it had promised never appeared, while the report on the 83/84 digs at surrounding sites by JL Flouest was also unavailable despite its apparent existence. Like Didier, Aitkin professed to be highly skeptical of Glozel’s authenticity, but his unpublished manuscript contained a telltale nugget: his tests had eliminated the possibility that 6 ceramic artifacts had been re-constituted, including 4 which had given ancient TL results! It went on: there was evidence that one of the objects had been heated twice, and another, whose date had come in at 1110 AD had been heated 3 times. In short, several typically Glozelian artifacts were too old to be forgeries and could only be older than the already old dates they had provided.
The second name was that of Maurice Franc, the local expert on the numerous ring-tunnels which surround Glozel. Franc was convinced that TL evidence from Glozel clearly showed it was real. What’s more, some of the Glozel dates corresponded to more than 60 TL results he’d obtained from shards from the tunnels. He even had an explanation.
The tunnels were grouped in 2 main concentrations: 1 in the rugged center of France, especially around Glozel, and another on Austria’s northern border. The tunnel shards from France start at 280 AD at la Boule de la Chapelle and cluster between 460 and 760 AD – the Invasion Period. Coincidentally, the northern border of Roman Gaul had first been breached by barbarians in 260 AD, and waves of conquerors had certainly forced refugees forward as well. Franc speculated that such refugees would not have settled in the fertile lowlands coveted by invaders, but in uninviting highlands where the refugees stood a chance of being left in peace. According to this theory, the reason the ring tunnels and Glozel were only in hilly areas was because they had been built by the same refugee culture from Central Europe. If Franc was right, the earliest shards in the Czech tunnels should be older than the French ones.
But why were the last of the tunnel TL dates from around 800? Again Franc had an hypothesis: the best preserved tunnels had an alcove with an altar hewn in the rock and their circularity made it impractical to store merchandise in them. If you tried moving a crate around the ring, it would constantly get jammed. So, despite other archeologists’ arguments that the ring tunnels were merely fruit cellars from the 15th and 16th centuries, the tunnels were probably ceremonial.
Franc noted that one of the ways the Catholic Church had fought to suppress earlier religions as it consolidated its hold during the Dark Ages was by issuing dozens of edicts against the “pagan” practice of cremation. But the church had issued its last ban in 785 AD. Apparently, the last hold-outs for the “pagan” rites finally fell into line around then.
Franc could even explain why most of the extensive ring tunnels were mysteriously filled with sterile soil without a trace of archeological deposits: they’d been emptied of their contents – probably cremation jars whose only vestiges were shards like the ones he’d collected. Then each ring tunnel had been totally filled and plugged with soil from one end to the other to stop parishioners from ever using them again.
Finding one intact would be as hard as finding an unpillaged pharaoh’s tomb. We thought of the Fradin children’s alleged finding of the clogged tunnel in 1963. What if the Glozelian artifacts found so far were only the equivalent of the grave goods of the poor left in a pyramid’s shadow?
Franc led us to Hugues Dourvert – and a revelation even Franc didn’t know. As we were gathering shards underground for our own tests, Dourvert revealed how he’d become hooked on inventorying the rings. Children had found a tunnel near his house south of Glozel and had brought him a large flat rock covered with lightly incised symbols. He and his wife thought the children had been playing at inventing a code and left the stone in the yard before moving away.
Fifteen years later, they returned and were eventually taken by relatives for an excursion to the little museum at Glozel. There, the Dourverts were astounded to see stones with the same symbols as the ones they had last seen in their garden. His stone had oxidized under moss and lichen in the meantime, making it almost indecipherable, but Dourvert actually gave it to us for analysis.
The strange thing is how many of these artifacts may have been overlooked – or worse, dismissed. Aitkin’s successor as head of the now private Oxford Lab, Doreen Stoneham, dropped a bomb by announcing that she’d seen a tablet covered with inscriptions just like Glozel’s in a provincial Portuguese museum, but had jumped to the conclusion that Morlet had snuck a forgery into the collection.
In fact, the tablet in question was almost certainly akin to or even one of the numerous objects with “Glozelian” inscriptions and animals found in a dolmen near Alvao and published in Portugalia in 1899 and 1900 – 24 years before Glozel’s discovery. The most famous prehistorian of the first half of the 20th Century, the Abbé Breuil, was the first to notice the resemblance and considered the Alvao artifacts to be from the Iron Age. They too may be fake, but all the same, Stoneham’s reaction shows that the lengths some scientists will go to dismiss Glozel are just as amazing as the lengths any Spirit is supposed to have gone to.
Even now, after we have gotten several top French archeologists to look over our data and go on the record saying that at least some of the Glozel corpus must be real, their institution’s contempt for the site dies hard. Some have come out and expressed it: “Even if Glozel is old, so what? What you’ve found just suggests that it’s some rustic aspect of the Dark Ages: a provincial sect of illiterate lumberjacks and glassmakers practicing degraded alchemy - not high culture.”
One of the Portuguese tablets
What chauvinism! If real, Glozel may represent the tip of a cultural iceberg from the least understood and yet formative age in French and European history. What’s more, instead of being an isolated phenomenon – one of the most often cited reasons for dismissing it – Glozel may be linked with tunnels found from the Czech Republic to the Massif Central.
A cartoonist view of Glozel in the Twenties
Or could Glozel represent something entirely different? A true surprise ending? In 1999, McKerrell concluded, on the basis of 68 TL dates from 37 artifacts performed by 3 different labs, that the most typically Glozelian objects such as face urns, inscribed tablets and hermaphroditic genital sculptures cluster around 100 BC (+/-200). By those measurements, Glozel could turn out to be a pre-Roman Gallic mystery cult based on merging sexual dualities as neatly as do the yin and yang.
Although a few Glozelian TL results do fall within the 280 AD to 750 AD time-frame that suits Franc’s theory, McKerrell also demonstrated that the site was used intensively for glass-making around 1250 AD, reheating many artifacts. The last barrier to accepting this analysis falls when one takes into consideration Aitkin’s unpublished article eliminating the possibility of re-constitution. So to preserve the connection between Glozel and at least a few of the rings, it may be necessary to test another scenario: that existing subterranean structures were reused and extended by a later culture, which would be no more surprising than the fact that many Catholic churches are copies of Roman temples. Either way, most of the Glozel pottery is ancient, no forgery, and represents the tip of some iceberg - a berg hidden perhaps in a tunnel under the Champ des Morts.
So should today’s mocking archeologists be the latest researchers to see their reputations tarnished by Glozel’s curse? No, they loathed Glozel for seemingly meritorious reasons, while performing path-breaking science elsewhere. Like every other scientist they do their best to check their hypotheses, then reach conclusions they know will be tested. But sometimes science is betrayed by biases so insidious that they may be subtly passed from mentors to their apprentices in mutating forms and become institutional taboos. After all, a scientist can lose funding for not being politically correct.
Emile Fradin’s father exploring a tomb as Dorothy Garrod holds the fence
On the flip side, what of the “Spirit”? More work is needed - especially on the bone. Even if part of the Glozel finds – the pottery – may end up being vindicated, the bone must undergo equal scrutiny to explain how it could have survived the soil’s acidity, to account for incoherent carbon 14 dates and to see under 400 power if a forger’s tools left telltale scaling on already old materials. In the meantime, the Spirit represents the deceit which has run through the affair and may have manifested itself through many people, Glozelians and anti-Glozelians alike.
Despite the deceptions, though, one thing is now clear: there is an avalanche of new data and testimony suggesting that Glozel can not be dismissed. So it’s high time that a real investigation of France’s oldest archeological mystery begin - starting with uncovering the spot where the Fradins claim to have hid the most startling structure of all!
My dear friend, Ed Flaherty, who was my comrade and cameraman, between J-C Fradin & a friend of Glozel during the filming.
Footnotes:
1. A sharecropper who preceded the Fradins is said to have found an inscribed vase at the site while burying a dead animal in the 19th century. Also, myriad shards are said to have been noticed there in 1889 during forest clearing.
2. Glozel deer, which appear on bone and pebbles, but not the ceramics which were the sole target of our investigation, often have an antler projecting forward over the eyes. Although it is true that reindeer have such antlers, there are many archeological examples of red deer, including in Spanish Mesolithic rock paintings, being presented in the same way.
3. Letter to Fradin from H. Delporte, pg 254 in “Glozel et ma Vie”
4. Communication from Doreen Stoneham, head of the Oxford Dating Lab
5. “Les analyses de verre et de poteries de Glozel” Hugh McKerrell & Alice Gerard, Actes du 2ème Colloque Glozel, 1999, pg. 31. The glass was a type using fern ash which was peculiar to the Middle Ages.
6. Canal +, J-P Demoule & J-P Daugas
7. Emile alludes to the incident in his biography, Glozel et ma vie, on page 235
8. “Archaeomagnetic Intensity Measurements on Glozelian Objects of Baked Clay”, M.J. Aitkin, 1995. (See also “Archaeomagnetic Analyses of Six Glozelian Ceramic Artifacts” by Mike Barbetti, 1976 with corrections by John Shaw in his article “Rapid changes in the magnitude of the archaeomagnetic field”, 1979)
9. Jean-Jacques Behain, Institut de Paléontologie Humaine (IPH) , A. Hurel (IPH), etc.