THE GLOZEL FINDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19859, 1 February 1928, Page 11

THE GLOZEL FINDS.

FRENCH SCIENTISTS' VIEW. DISCOVERIES OF NO VALUE. A. and N.Z. PABIS, Jan. 29. The Committee for Prehistoric Monuments has decided, with one dissentient, to xequest the Government to remove Glezei from the list of prehistoric sites because they think it is valueless. Objects found within recent years aud in lavge numbers; at Glozel. near Vichy, in France, have given rise to a learned but violent controversy. The site has -since been sequestrated and scheduled by the French Governmenut as an ancient Monument, of rational importance. The viewa of eminent archaeologists on the matter differ widely. One of them, Mr. 0. G. S. Crawford, recently wrote in the Times: "Glozel is a tiny* hamlet near Vi<J>y 5 in Central Franca. It lies hidden away iu the mountains and is not an easy place to get to. It consists of four houses only, forming a farm occupied by a peasant family named Fradiu. , In "March. 1924, young Fradin, then apparently a boy in his teens, was ploughing in a field there, when he struck some big stones with his plough. He set to work and soon revealed what was evidently the debris of a glass-furnace. ... Exactly a, year ago, when I first heard of Glozel, I, determined to go there and see for myself. I was shown the site and the finds by young Fradin and Dr. Morlet. The socalled excavations had evidently been conducted as badly as excavations could be. There "-as no order visible—only a chaotic mess of holes, like the Somme battlefield in miniature. I left convinced that the glass-furnace had existed, but that everything else was a modern fabrication. The Abbe Breuil, whose opinion carries such great weight, clearly regarded the engravings and harpoons as forgeries, though he did not state his opinion in so many words; and, so far as some of the other objects and their position in the soil were concerned, he put too much trust in the reports of others who had plainly been deceived. .. ~ The pages of the Mercure were full of learned disputations, not about- the genuineness of the finds —that was accepted—but about their age. One school, led by M. Carnille Jullian, maintained that Glozel represented the magic-bag of. a Gallc -Roman witch doctor. He translated some of the formulae which he was satisfied resembled others he had come across elsewhere. There were some who differed from him, but on points of detail "m Vay son de Pradenne, a shrewd civil engineer, did some digging at Glozel, with Dr Morlet and Fradin in attendance. M. Va'vson found that one of the inscribed objects had been surreptitiously ittseited in the ground by a small tunnel, without disturbing the. surface. Such risks should have deceived no experienced excavator, aud they did not deceive M. Yayson.