On March 1, 1924, a 17-year-old peasant youth Emile Fraden (August 8, 1906 - February 10, 2010), together with his grandfather, Claude Fradin, went out in the spring to plow their field. This ordinary event took place in the village of Glosel, in the municipality of Ferrier-sur-Sichon in the Allier department of the Auvergne region in central France, 30 kilometers from the city of Vichy.
During plowing, the leg of one of the oxen pulling the plow fell into the ground and got stuck in a cavity. The young man tried to free the leg of the ox, but he himself plunged into the pit. This is how an underground chamber about three meters long with walls made of mud bricks was discovered. Emil, with the help of his grandfather, dug a hole, it was covered with 16 floor tiles and contained human bones, ceramic fragments, among which lay a polished stone ax.
Schematic representation of the discovered underground chamber
This find further provoked a grandiose archaeological scandal.
In March, local teacher Andrienne Pikande visited the Fraden farm and then informed the education minister of the find. With the help of his schoolteacher, the young man dug earth in the field around the site over the next few weeks.
On July 9, Fradenov, accompanied by Andrienne Piquande, was visited by another teacher, Benoit Clement, representing the Société d'Émulation du Bourbonnais. He later returned with another man, Joseph Vilpe. Clement and Vilpe, using pickaxes, broke the remaining walls of the burial, which they took with them.
Later, Vilpe wrote to Emile Fraden that he identified the site as belonging to the Gallo-Roman period around 100-400 BC. AD and possibly of archaeological significance. The January issue of the Bulletin de la Société d'Émulation du Bourbonnais mentioned the finds at Glozel.
Emil Fraden inside his museum. 1920s
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The article in the newsletter interested Antonin Morlet (May 16, 1882 - 1965), a physician and amateur archaeologist from the resort town of Vichy. On April 26, Morlaix visited the farm and offered 200 francs, a considerable amount of money at the time, for the opportunity to excavate the Fradinov farm. Morlaix had studied the Gallo-Roman era for a long time and was well versed in archeology for that time. He was eager to dig. In his opinion, the objects found could be much older than the period of antiquity and their appearance can even be attributed to the Neolithic era.
The Fradin family accepts Morlaix's proposal. He carried out his first excavations, which continued regularly until 1936.
On May 24, 1925, Morlaix began excavations. There were found tablets, idols, bones, flint tools and stones with inscriptions engraved on them. In September 1925, Morlaix, in collaboration with Emil Fradin, published a report on the results of the excavations, in which he attributed the excavation site to the Neolithic.
The young man devoted several years to the study of ancient finds, later he created a small private museum on his farm, where ancient artifacts discovered in the field were exhibited.
Glosel, the image of a reindeer
Having collected an extraordinary collection, Morlaix expressed the opinion that the Glozel culture flourished after the end of the last ice age about 10 thousand years ago, when artifacts of the early Stone Age were mixed with later archaeological material. The unique nature of the finds from Glosel caught many French archaeologists by surprise and took a low profile.
In 1927, two other tombs were discovered. In April 1928, a large amount of excavation was carried out.
A huge number of finds were dug from the shallow soil layer on the side of the hill, which they dubbed "the field of the dead." There were carved bones, similar to specimens from Stone Age caves in France, drawings of deer and horses, supplied with letters, and sometimes whole inscriptions. Other materials clearly from a later period included polished stone axes and crudely molded pots with facial images and inscriptions similar to those carved into bones. Among the ceramics were bizarre phallic figures and handprints three times the size of real ones.
The most enigmatic find made at Glozel were dozens of bricks speckled with inscriptions and reminiscent of baked clay tablets from the Near East; however, the inscriptions were made in an unknown language. In all, about 5,000 objects were discovered and displayed for display in a small museum hosted by the Frodens.
French archaeological circles disdained Morlaix's 1925 report, published by an amateur and a peasant boy.
Morlaix then invited a number of archaeologists during 1926 to visit the site, including Solomon Reinach, curator of the National Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, who spent three days digging. Reinach confirmed the authenticity of the excavation site in correspondence with the Academy of Inscriptions and Fine Arts.
Glosel became a local landmark, and a stream of tourists flocked there, visiting the Froden Museum and the cafe, which they also decorated with their unusual finds.
In April 1926, Antonin Morlet published an article with his hypothesis about the Neolithic dating of the Glozel tablets alphabet. He had no doubt that these inscriptions were much older than the famous Phoenician texts. And immediately, heated discussions began in the scientific world. The scientific community was divided into two opposing camps: supporters and opponents of the Morlet dating. In the future, these groups even began to be called "Glozelians" and "Anti-Glozelians". The "Glozelites" defended Morlaix's theory, and their opponents questioned everything, believing that provincial amateur archaeologists and a semi-literate peasant boy could not discover anything so outstanding.
However, for many, the circumstances of the discoveries seemed highly suspicious. The finds were a jumble of material from various archaeological periods. At the same time, they were all found in a thin layer of soil without signs of stratification. There were no pits or flat surfaces where individual items could be preserved, but most of the pots were found intact, which is extremely rare during ordinary excavations. The mysterious untranslatable tablets were unlike any archaeological finds made in France. The curator of the local museum said that when he was hiding from a thunderstorm in the stables on the Fraden farm, he saw several inscribed but not burned tablets.
At a meeting of the International Institute of Anthropology in Amsterdam, held in September 1927, the Glosel excavation was the subject of heated debate. A commission was appointed to conduct further research of the excavation site, which arrived on the site on November 5, 1927. During the three-day excavation, journalists and reporters watched the excavation. They selected plots at random and started digging there, but on the first day they found nothing. From the second day on, they began to come across already familiar archaeological materials, which they suspected were planted, - in particular, an inscribed tablet found at the bottom of a "pocket" of loose brown soil, completely different from the gray soil around it. In an attempt to protect themselves from night forgery, archaeologists who were members of the commission sprinkled the site with plaster chips.
Dorothy Garrod, a young French archaeologist who was checking the condition of the protective coating the next morning, met with Dr. Morlaix, who accused her of trying to fabricate finds to discredit his work. The relationship between them finally deteriorated; Morlaix and his supporters were convinced that the commission was against them. In its report in December 1927, the commission announced: "Based on joint observations and discussions, we came to the conclusion that all the materials we studied in Glosel are fake and have no archaeological value."
Some scientists, who initially publicly declared the authenticity of the Glozel finds, suddenly moved to the anti-Glozel camp, and not always for purely scientific reasons. For example, archaeologists Captain and Bray were offended because Morlaix, who had done all the titanic work on the excavations for many years, refused to include them in the list of co-authors, after which they began to declare forgeries. Another scientific authority of those times joined the anti-Glozelians because Emil Fraden refused to sell him his collection of ancient artifacts, etc.
René Dusseau, curator of the Louvre and renowned expert on ancient inscriptions, accused the farmer Emile Fraden of forgeries and forgeries. He, in response, on January 8, 1928, sued him for libel.
Then the president of the French Prehistoric Society, Felix Regnault, having visited a small museum on Fraden's farm in Glosel on 24 February 1928, where the price of 4 francs per ticket seemed to him too high, filed a complaint of fraud.
The next day, police, accompanied by Regno, searched the museum, destroyed glass cases and seized three boxes of antiquities and documents. Emile Fraden himself, who wrote Glosel and My Life many years later, described this visit of the police as the destruction of his museum.
On February 28, the lawsuit against Dusseau was suspended due to pending indictment by Regno against Fraden.
A new group of neutral archaeologists, called the Research Committee, was nominated from scholars who were new to the issue of the controversy. Excavating from April 12-14, 1928, they discovered many artifacts, and in their report they confirmed the authenticity of the excavation site, which they attributed to the Neolithic period.
The study of Glozel archaeological antiquities has also reached the level of the criminal police. The head of the Paris forensic service, Gaston-Edmond Beyle, himself, together with the judge and experts, began to study the objects seized by the police during a search in the private museum of Emile Fraden.
In a report presented in 1929, Baile and forensic experts concluded that the clay tablets were a replica, i.e. recent forgeries. Their tests showed that the pottery was soft and water-soluble, that the clay from which some of the pots were made contained fresh moss and scraps of cotton cloth, layers of which were painted with modern paints. The experts also stated that the study of some carved bones and stone axes showed that they were processed using metal tools, and the data on the long-term storage of the tablets in the ground, in their opinion, were not confirmed.
But if these finds are considered fakes, then it is worth recognizing the 17-year-old peasant boy Emil Fraden, who barely graduated from a rural school, a genius, an inventor of a new type of writing, a connoisseur of Phoenician, Celtic and ancient Iberian texts, etc. So the story of the finds in Glozel became even more mysterious.
Over time, it became known that the head of the expert service, Beil, declaring that he was a doctor of sciences, in fact did not have a high academic degree, as well as a diploma confirming this. Once, in a major forensic examination in Belgium, he confused blood tests with fecal tests, which is why the defense that invited him to the trial failed miserably in court. A few months later, on September 16, 1929, the pseudo-Doctor Bayle was killed by a man who was very far from archeology and, most likely, from science.
On June 4, 1929, Emil Fraden was charged and found guilty of fraud based on the Bayle report. The verdict was overturned by the Court of Appeal in April 1931. The libel charge against Dussault went to court in March 1932, and Dussault was found guilty of libel. However, according to the court's decision, the amount of compensation was only one franc and therefore his victory can hardly be called a triumph. He later described this process in his book, comparing it to the Inquisition's witch-hunting courts.
Then in 1932, the unbroken Fraden won the libel case against the curator of the Louvre, who unreasonably called him a fraud.
After 1941, private excavations were prohibited by law and the site remained intact until 1983, when the Ministry of Culture again refused to allow excavations. The full excavation report was never published, but a short 13-page report appeared in 1995. The authors suggest that the excavation site dates back to the Middle Ages (about 500 - 1500 AD), possibly contains some objects of the early Iron Age, probably enriched with forgeries.
By 1950, the general consensus among archaeologists was that the "Glozel affair" was a hoax supported by inexperienced and overly credulous researchers and had been forgotten for a long time.
With the advent of new dating methods, the "Glozel affair" again attracted attention.
The shards of glass were dated by the spectrograph in the 1920s and again in the 1990s at the University of Toronto by neutron activation analysis. Both analyzes place the material under study in the Middle Ages.
In 1974, four physicists discovered a new dating method - thermoluminescent (TL), and a number of objects were dated using a relatively new method that measures the accumulation of radioactivity in heated materials after the first firing. Analysis confirmed that ceramics were not produced in modern times.
In 1979, TL dating of 27 randomly selected artifacts out of 300 stored in the Glozel Museum divided them into three groups: the first was from the period between 300 BC. and 300 AD (Celtic and Roman Gaul), the second belongs to the Middle Ages, around the 13th century, and the third belongs to modern times. The 1983 TL dating at Oxford showed a range from the 4th century to the Middle Ages.
The carbon-14 dating of the bone fragments showed a range from the 13th to the 20th century. Three analyzes of C-14, carried out at Oxford in 1984 on a lump of coal, showed the period from the 11th to the 13th century, and the ivory ring fragment was attributed to the 15th century. A fragment of a human thigh was dated to the 5th century.
Among the artifacts found in Glosel, there are about a hundred ceramic tablets. The inscriptions on them are, on average, six or seven lines, mostly on one side, although some copies are inscribed on both sides.
The symbols on the tablets resemble the Phoenician alphabet, but they have not been completely deciphered. There were numerous claims for decipherment, including identification of the language of the inscriptions (like Basque, Chaldean, Hebrew, Iberian, Latin, Berber, Ligurian, Phoenician, and Turkic). In 1982, microbiologist Hans-Rudolf Hitz proposed a Celtic origin for the inscriptions, suggesting a Gaulish dialect. He believed that 25 characters were complemented by some variations and ligatures up to 60.
Morlet identified 111 different characters in the inscriptions. According to one hypothesis, a pseudo-alphabet is stored on medieval artifacts to serve as a kind of talisman for the deceased.
The first discovered underground chamber was probably a pottery kiln, which was then converted into a tomb in the thirteenth century.
Glozel's findings began to seem even less plausible after half a century of intensive research. Nowhere in France were inscribed tablets or pottery similar to those of Glosel found, so they seemed like a clear anomaly. Moreover, the new dates were even more discouraging than the old ones. The archeology of Celtic and Roman Gaul is very well studied, and the objects from Glosel have nothing to do with it. Alvin Brogan, the leading archeologist of this period, confirmed this opinion after studying the Glosel collection: “I cannot understand the following: according to the dating of the TL analysis, we should have found fragments of Celtic or Gallo-Roman ceramics or other objects during excavations, but in the collection of this museum, I have not found a single artifact of the Gallo-Roman or Celtic period."
Emil Fraden, who devoted his entire life to a unique archaeological site and defending its authenticity, nevertheless received recognition, albeit in extreme old age. On June 16, 1990, Emile Fraden was awarded the Order of the Academic Palms at the suggestion of Jacques Thierry, President of the International Center for the Study and Research of Glozel Finds.
Emile Fraden died in February 2010 at the age of 103 and was buried in his home village of Ferrier-sur-Sichon. His funeral was attended by the sous-prefect of the city of Vichy, Jean-Pierre Maurice, to pay his last respects to Fraden.
But the 90-year dispute between the Glozelites and the anti-Glozelites is not over yet. A small private museum on the farm of Emil Fraden is still working, and tourists can see the antiquities found by the peasant boy.
A group of enthusiasts, organized by René Germain, has set up an international research center at the site, composed of French and foreign scientists. Every year since 1999, they have gathered in the city of Vichy for regular seminars on the research of finds.
Despite long-term research into the Glosel artifacts, the contradiction between mainstream science and facts has never been resolved. After 70 years of heated debate, the origin of the Glozel finds remains a complete mystery.
Glosel continues to disturb the theory of archeology textbooks. The Glozel objects are a thousand years older than the tablets from Jemdet Nasr and prove that the "barbarians" of Neolithic Europe had knowledge and crafts long before it was supposed.