The Glozel Controversy

On March 1, 1924, a young French farm worker named Emile Fradin was ploughing his field when, suddenly, the soil caved in under his team. In the hole that opened up, Fradin found some old clay pots, which he promptly smashed in the hope that they contained treasure. But not a single coin was found. Fradin carried on searching and drug out several other vessels, as well as flat stones, bones, stone tools and clay tablets inscribed with mysterious characters. Shortly afterwards, the farmer showed his finds to a teacher with an interest in archeology.

The news of the discovery spread rapidly, and soon Antonin Morlet, an amateur archaeologist, announced that this was a prehistoric site, and the objects were at least 12,000-15,000 years old. This assessment, however, was contradicted strongly by professional archaeologists, who believed the finds were not genuine. Morlet saw only professional jealousy and a distortion of the facts. A series of court cases followed, with each side issuing pamphlets and official statements. France became divided into two camps: the one considered the finds genuine testimony to a prehistoric culture, while the other dismissed them as counterfeits.

The clay tablets

The Glozel controversy has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of human history. If the objects found by Emile Fradin were very old, it would mean that the characters inscribed on the clay tablets were written in Europe and not in the Middle East. Several years before, the script system of the Sumerians – assumed to be the earliest written language – had been discovered at sites in the Middle East estimated to be sites in the Middle East estimated to be around 5,000 years old. But neither side in the controversy was willing to compromise. As a result, the matter remained unresolved until the 1970s, when new research methods could provide much more precise dating. For example, the carbon-14 method can help determine the age of the organic matter, while the clay that was used to make a pot was fired. But even modern dating methods have not solved the mystery that surrounds the Glozel finds. Studies show that the clay tablets are barely 2,000 years old and date from Gallo-Roman times, while some of the bones are as old as 15,000 years. But this is not all. The stones and bones are inscribed with characters that obviously date from the Stone Age.

These inconsistencies seem to support the counterfeit theory: the combination of various objects clearly shows that Glozel is not a genuine prehistoric site. These sceptics suspect instead that someone has collected objects of different origin, some admittedly very old, and marked them with characters. This theory, however, does not in the least deter those who believe in the authenticity of Glozel. In their opinion, modern methods have proven the finds to be ancient. During the 1980s, France’s Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs commissioned new excavation work at the site. But as long as no new finds are recorded, the quarrel is unlikely to be resolved.