GLOZEL FINDS.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20292, 28 December 1927, Page 7

GLOZEL FINDS.

OLD OR NEW?

ANTIQUARIANS DIFFER

The site of the so-called prehistoric discoveries at Glozel, near Vichy, over which a violent controversy has been raging for some months between rival schools of archaeologists, has been declared a national historical monument. From now on, therefore. an official inventory of all further discoveries will be made by experts (writes the Paris correspondent of The Times recently). The purpose of this declaration is obviously to lift the whole problem of the Glozel site out of the controversial atmosphere in which it has beeme fogged, and to bring it back to the cooler air of official scientific control, while the Glozelists and anti-Glozelists are given time to recover their tempers and revise their epithets. Indeed, the flames of the controversy, fanned with impish humour by the lay press, had already strayed beyond the limits of propriety, and the profane public had been allowed to gloat over the comic spectacle of eminent pro-historians clubbing one another's opinions in terms among which “fool,” “idiot,” ‘ forger, and “ sot ” had become the common currency of the debate. A FARMER’S DISCOVERY.

Glozel is a hamlet a few miles to the south of Vichy, standing amid woodlands and poor pasturage farmed by a few peasants who have wrung a living from it as only French peasants can. In March, 1924 — all the statements are reproduced with reserve —one of the farmers, named Fradct, in the course of ploughing came upon a large stone which he duly levered out with a crowbar. Why it had remained undetected throughout generations ot farming is not explained. But at some later stage, after a groat many stones had been levered up, there appeared on tno scone Dr A. Morlct, an antiquary and authority on prehistoric remains, living at Vichy, and in April, 1925, he had entered into a sort of partnership with M. tradet for making special excavations. In due time he reported on his work to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres. and gave a truly amazing account of the discoveries he claimed to have made, the academy was at first sceptical, but an important body of scientists came down to Glozel, inspected the site, and while disputing like scientists as to its date, meaning and influence on current knowledge, agreed that the finds marked an important stage in the study of early man. According to Dr Monet, whoso views found support among a considerable body of the learned men who interested themselves in the matter (among them M. Salomon Reinach, Dr van Jcnnop, MM. Maver, Esperandicu. Loth, de Laboido, Vie'nnot Butavaud, Senhors Leite de V nsconcellos, and Mcndes-Corvca, and Ur Bjorn), the site is a burial place of some noworful prehistoric tribe forming per haps a link between Palaeolithic and Neofithic man. Two trenches will, loosely laid square stones capable of taking human body are understood to hnyo been unearthed, and they m e I nought to reveal faint traces of human remains Ihe tribe (this is on the authority of the cxpeiU burned its dead before buying them and believed in a future state, as , lar p bers of vessels which presumably had contained food, implements, and articles of primitive decoration were discerned in the graves. The pottery is of a emious type; the urns arc moulded to represent grotesque faces, they are-sometimes adorned with phallic . symbols, they at e ornamented with designs representing the reindeer, and, strangest of all, they ate in part covered with been called “ alphabotiform marks. In each tomb baked and glazed c ay tablets bear ing what appear to be long inscriptions in the same characters have come to light. Weapons, handles, carved horn, spindles, and stone axes are among the fi ” dS ' THE TWO SCHOOLS.

Reports on these objects have been contributed at great length to the Mercure de France, one of the few reviews willing to open its pages to the subject, hv Dr Morlet, who has retained the excavations and the cataloguing in his own hands. These reports have produced two schools of controversialists—the believers, or Glozelists, and the unbelievers, or antiGlozelists. The Glozelists count among their number some of the most distinguished members of the academy, as well as eminent foreign prehistorians and anthropologists. But they are not all agreed among themselves. One group supports wholeheartedly Dr Morlet s theory of the link between old and newer Stone Age men; another is a little puzzled bv th ■ fact that there are specimens which might belong to the Magdelcman Azihan, Eoanthropic, Palaeolithic, and .Neolithic periods, and this group finds it hard to explain their presence simultaneously on a single site and in a single tomb. -a third'group, till recently »led by M. Camille Jullian, thinks that the site may belong to a period no more remote than the Gallo-Roman era. The group has even reduced one of the inscriptions to an archaic form of cursive Latin, and has endowed it with a meaning from which it is argued that the site was once the workshop of a Gallic sorcerer. Hie controversy is centred chiefly round the inscribed urns and tablets, and still rages fiercely as to whether the writings are Aegeo-Cretain, Phoenician, or crude Latin, with less thought to how an isolated patch of Oriental civilisation could come to be formed in so remote a corner of Prance at so remote an age. _ The anti-Glozelists will have nothing of it. Some Glozelists further assert that the urns, owing to the narrowness of their openings, cannot have served for domestic purposes; that tne crude representations of death carved on them indicate a sepulchral use; and that the writings may be ritual invocations for the peace of the dead. Others deny all these statements, and offer diftcieut explanations. , c ~ But this is only one aspect ot the controversv. Their internecine disputes are overshadowed by the flat declaration of the anti-Glozcliste that the whole thing lq a fraud, that the tombs have been deliberately constructed, the urns manufactured for the purpose, the implements surreptitiously imported to the sitesomewhat unskilfully as to period—the whole thing, in fact, “faked. M. Dlssaud, the leading authority on epigraphy, himself a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, has declared that there can be no doubt whatever in the mind of any honest export that the alphahetiform characters” are impudent forgeries, and were scratched quite recently. He intends shortly to come into the open with his proofs and stake his 30 years experience on what he believes to be me truth. Other archaeologists—it is not necessarv to name them —have been doing a little detective exploration on their own account. They have gone down to Giozel by car in the dead of night in order to apply the methods of Sherlock Holmes in prehistoric tombs. They do not hesitate to assert that the whole affair is a fraud, and that any witchcraft it is capable of exercising must have affected the intelligences or intellects of their brother scientists. Meanwhile, Dr Morlet conducts in the Mercure de France an extremely able controversy with his detractors, who by now must at least admit that whatever may be the limits to his knowledge of pre-history, hie skill in polemics is beyond question. it is at this stage that the Minister of Education has stepped in. No doubt a very little examination from the outside will settle the question whether Glozelism is a hoax or not. If it is, it is a complete and extremely ekilful one.