Emile Fradin, a 17 year old farmer's son from le Glozel, a small hamlet in Franc, stumbled upon one of the most contentious archaeological discoveries ever. On freeing the foot of a cow from a hole while he was ploughing, he and his father uncovered an oval brick -lined pit, containing a human skull and carved bones, carved pebbles, pots and clay tablets with mysterious symbols.
Dr Antonin Morlet (1882-1965), an amateur archaeologist, began more extensive excavations and concluded that it was a unique Neolithic site. He immediately published his findings, but was called a charlatan, as his finds resembled no known Neolithic remains. The teenager Fradin was denounced as a forger, and there was a police raid on the family farm.
Emile Fradin counter-attacked citing defamation of character, and he and his father set up a museum in a farm outbuilding to display more than 2000 objects from le Champ des Morts (the Field of the Dead). Five decades later , scientists decided to test the ceramics from the site with the newly developed thermo-luminescence dating technique. The ceramics did not date from the 1920's, nor from Neolithic times, but from the Late Iron Age/Gallo-Roman periods (c.200 BCE to 400 CE). Over the next two decades it was discovered the oval pit seemed to be a 12th - 13th century glass kiln, and there had also been early postmedieval activity involving human burial.
Carbon-14 dating now showed that some carved bones were of medieval date, c.1100 - 1300. the finds which are firmly dated by thermo-luminescence contain no single object typical of the well-documented cultures of that region and period. Were it not for the scientific dating undertaken in the mid -1970's onwards, many would have dismissed the site as a hoax.
Anybody had seen the Glozel reindeer stone and the Ica glazed stones of Peru?
ReplyDeleteWhat are the similarities and the differences?
Are there glazed stones from Glozel?
Would be great to know.