The title of this chapter would suggest Brittany and the Celtic languages, rather than the ancient Gauls, to the contemporary French public. The success of the Asterix books (Goscinny and Uderzo i960), which portray an idealized world peopled by very conventional Gauls with characteristics inherited from the Age of Romanticism, has only marginally increased the interest of the public in these obscure periods: the concepts of ‘the Iron Age’ and of ‘protohistory’ remain completely unknown to them. French archaeological research has concentrated on the Palaeolithic and on Gallo-Roman antiquity, the latter considered to be the principal source of French culture. Historians of the medieval period have failed to consider the protohistoric substratum of the country’s occupation and it fell to F. Braudel, a modern historian, to suggest the development of a ‘long-term history’ in which the contribution of these far distant times might be taken into account.
Although the French of today take little Interest in scientific research into Celtic culture, they do acknowledge the Gauls as their ‘ancestors’. As is the case in several European countries, references to early, ancestral inhabitants first appear during the Renaissance, in works on genealogy which set out to link the royal dynasty to classical and biblical antiquity, drawing on - in this case - Gallic intermediaries. In subsequent centuries, a more scholarly analysis of the classical texts obliged writers to bring the Celts within the scope of acceptable ‘history’ which, at that time, did not extend back beyond the antiquity of Greece and Rome. In the explanations they offered, authors of this period tried to counterbalance the defeats of 52 BC at the end of the Gallic War by reference to the victorious raids during earlier centuries, when Gallic troops spread terror in Greece and Italy.
Not until the work of the Benedictines of Saint Maur (Dom Martin Bouquet 1738) do we find scientifically based critical analysis of the classical texts. At that time, however, archaeological finds were still regarded as little more than curiosities of interest only to antiquarians. The complete lack of any means of ordering chronological sequences for pre - and protohistoric periods led to the wholesale attribution to the Gauls of everything that was not recognizably Roman.
The archaeology of the Gelts of Gaul effectively begins in the middle of the
Nineteenth century with the work of Napoleon the Third and the scholarly societies which then flourished widely in France. The high standards of fieldwork achieved by the teams sponsored by the emperor, and by a few notable individual excavators, such as J.-G. Bulliot at Mont Beuvray (Nievre) or Castagne at Murcens (Lot) are remarkable for their date. As the identification of sites mentioned in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico was the motivation behind much of this research, the final word as regards interpretation still invariably went to historians, to whom the indications provided by the written record remained the primary evidence. Thus was created a history and an image of the Gauls in which archaeological findings continued to play relatively little part.
The development of Celtic studies this century consists of a number of strands. In the universities, a historical perspective essentially informed by the classical texts remained dominant. It is clearly represented in the writings of scholars from C. Jullian to P.-M. Duval. Contrastingly, the recovery of archaeological evidence was the principal aim of the research programmes of learned societies and of enlightened amateurs, of whom the most outstanding was J. Dechelette. For over a century, personnel at the national archaeological museum at St-Germain-en-Laye, the Musee des Antiquites Nationales (founded in 1865), and three Paris-based institutions - the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1869), the Ecole du Louvre (1882) and the College de Erance (1905) - have ensured that links between these two intellectual traditions have been maintained. Despite real successes in raising its profile in Erance’s research community and with the general public, the study of the Iron Age is still only marginally represented in the universities, where it continues to be considered as a foundation myth rather than a vibrant component of the history of the country. As far as school textbooks are concerned, in many cases the Gauls ‘may be considered as one of the topmost strata of the physical structure of France. With them, we find ourselves in a period before history began’ (Guiomar 1982: 395).
The first significant archaeological discoveries last century were of burial-places - either flat graves as in the Marne area, or barrows covering burials - and of hill-forts which scholars were quite prepared to identify as examples of ‘Caesar’s camps’. The cemeteries of the Marne were unmethodically excavated, the sole aim being to gather objects which could enrich museum displays. With few exceptions, the contents of these cemeteries cannot now be reassembled into individual grave and cemetery groups. Furthermore, during the 1914-1918 war, some of these assemblages were destroyed. Even the sizeable collections dating from this period in the Musee des Antiquites Nationales can only really be used for typological analyses and similar exercises, since the contexts of many objects are not known in detail.
The search for the battlefields of Caesar’s Gallic War obsessed researchers and fieldworkers throughout the nineteenth century. The efforts of both learned societies and the national commissions underpinned the production of coherent syntheses drawing on the archaeological material recovered in this pursuit. Many of these overviews appeared at the end of the nineteenth century. Though cultural and period subdivisions such as the ‘Marnian’ (early Second Iron Age; after the Marne cemeteries) and the ‘Beuvraysian’ (late Second Iron Age, named for Mont Beuvray) (Figure 29.1) developed by de Mortillet from French data were abandoned in 1900 m favour of the wider European period divisions devised by O. Tischler, the
Figure 29.1 Map of sites mentioned in this chapter.
Publication of J. Dechelette’s four-volume Manual underlines the importance of the French contribution to archaeological research on the Iron Age. This major archaeological synthesis of European prehistory from the earliest times until the expansion of the ancient civilizations was matched by the work of C. Jullian, especially the first volume of his Histoire de la Gaule. Published in 1907, this provided the philological and linguistic source for the later periods covered by Dechelette’s Manual (Dechelette 1914).
These two syntheses seem to tower over the achievements of the inter-war generation. The most important work in France at this time was that of English researchers (in particular M. Wheeler in Normandy) or of individual amateurs. More recently, the establishment in the 1950s of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique has provided the framework for the recruitment of professional researchers. CNRS personnel can be attached to institutions such as those mentioned above, or to the universities of Strasbourg, Paris, Aix and Montpellier. A new generation of learned societies (Ogam, Societe Prehistorique Fran9aise, Association Fran9aise pour I’Etude de I’Age du Fer) acted as a fresh focus for research. Lastly, the great increase in rescue excavations in the 1980s produced new information in quantity on the rural world of the Iron Age, In particular on Its smaller settlements, its farms and Its fields.
World History
