Talk:Glozel artifacts

Comments

There can be no case of "Stone Age writing" here. The artifacts clearly date to various epochs, and even if some of the artifacts are Neolithic, the presence of Iron Age, Medieval and even Modern bones shows that the objects, if genuine, must have been interred at a time when they were already ancient. The possibility that the tablets contain Gaulish inscriptions is sensational enough, and of great importance for Celtic studies, comparable to the Lepontic inscriptions. But Gerard's analysis dates to 2005, and we'll have to wait for how it is received by experts. dab (ᛏ) 10:50, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

In the fourth para under Discovery and Excavation "After 1942, a new law outlawed private excavations, and the site remained untouched until the Ministry of Culture re-opened excavations in 1938." These dates don't make sense, 1938 does not follow 1942. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.161.59.242 (talk) 23:47, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

The french article states '1983'... 1938 looks like a typo to me. Fmlo 87.61.139.55 (talk) 20:42, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

The linked obituary from The Daily Telegraph states:

Attempts to settle the Glozel controversy with the aid of modern science, carbon dating and thermoluminescence have convinced the mainstream of archaeological opinion that the finds, which do not conform with anything found elsewhere, should not be taken seriously.

That's curious because the article says something completely different, namely that the finds have been established as genuinely ancient with the help of modern dating methods, even if the interpretation of the finds is not at all clear. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 14:53, 10 July 2012 (UTC)

More Comments

See the current Glozel Sign List at Sue Sullivan's Facebook page; you may have to do a search on it to find it. Glozel script is read from left to right. It encodes a Celtic language that can be understand by searching for the words in University of Wales' proto-Celtic lexicon. Most of the texts appear to be grave markers. The site of Glozel was most likely an Iron Age Gaulish cemetery. 76.191.150.36 (talk) 21:27, 16 December 2014 (UTC)

Non-English chapter

I removed this chapter from the article; maybe somebody can translate it:

Nel 2007 il prof.Gigi Sanna, docente di Storia della Chiesa presso l'Istituto di Scienze Religiose di Oristano (Sardegna), dopo aver preso direttamente visione degli oggetti di Glozel, ha formulato l'ipotesi (temporaneamente sostenuta e poi abbandonata da M. Butavand)che i documenti di Glozel riportino l'alfabeto e la lingua oracolare del Santuario di Pito in Grecia. Un alfabeto ambiguo od 'obliquo' (composto prevalentemente da vocali) organico al culto del Lossia, dio androgino, dio della 'rete' e cacciatore del 'lupo', salvatore e soccorritore, invocato con l'appellativo di IHEIOS ed HIOS. I documenti in ceramica, in osso e in pietra, teste Erodoto (Historiae I, 163)sarebbero giunti in Francia con gli 'ANATHEMATA' o oggetti votivi che i Focesi in seguito all'invasione persiana della città (545 a.C.) portarono con sè, prima ad Aleria e a Marsiglia, e quindi attraverso il Rodano e la Loira a Glozel. Il documento più interessante di quelli rinvenuti in Glozel è la tav. D56 (CDI del Morlet, pl. XLIV, p.69) in quanto riporta l'oracolo del Lossia che annuncia ad una certa popolazione che nè i Piti nè le altre città dell'Anfizionia, 'potrebbero accorrere in tempo, nè potrebbero salvarli'. Forse il responso dell'oracolo, dato l'alfabeto greco estremamente arcaico, si riferisce alla invasione imminente delle popolazioni doriche nel continente greco.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Skysmith (talk • contribs) 08:50, November 30, 2010 (UTC)

the reference is

Gigi Sanna, Da Tzricotu (Sardegna) a Delfi (Grecia) percorrendo Glozel (Francia). I segni del Lossia Cacciatore. Le lettere ambigue di Apollo e l'alfabeto protogreco di Pito.; S'Alvure ed. Oristano 2007.

apparently some eccentric "decipherment". Not sure whether it's worth mentioning. I seriously have never heard of a deity "Lossia the hunter". Herodotus I.163 mentions nothing of the kind. --dab (𒁳) 20:06, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Just one glance here : [1]--93.45.65.59 (talk) 17:10, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

POV

The whole affair is seriously messy, but it looks as though this article is much more optimistic than the scientific community. Alice Gerard's self-published 2005 work in which she dismisses all the critics seems to have had very little in the way of attention from mainstream scientists in various fields, and the current opinion seems to be that this is a medieval site. See[2] and [3]. Doug Weller (talk) 11:22, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Another good source is the 2002 Antiquity article at[4]. Note also how much space we give to a microbiologist, while we give none to for instance Colin Renfrew. Doug Weller (talk) 11:41, 8 July 2015 (UTC)

Even more useful is this 2008 book[5] Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes and Forgeries Hardcover – 3 Dec 2008 by Paul Craddock (Editor). The author points out that the site basically had no features other than the remains of a medieval glass furnace, with only three layers, the topsoil, a layer of yellow clay containing the finds, and hard clay under that. "There were apparently just three layers, the topsoil, a layer of yellow clay which was said to contain the finds, and a harder, sterile clay beneath. Hundreds of artefacts were found but no features, no walls, pits, ditches, or ... anything.Yet the only way that these extremely fragile ceramics could have survived is if they had been buried in some form of pit. Thus the contradictory situation exists in which TL on the ceramics suggests that many of them arc probably in the region of about 2(100 years old, but the site from which they arc said to have come in the Champs des Morts does not archaeologically exist, as confirmed by archaeological excavations that finally took place at the site in the 1990s. This leads inexorably to the conclusion that the bulk of the material came from somewhere else. The close similarity between the clay in the field and that in the ceramics (Peacock, 1976), suggests the ‘somewhere else* is not far away. The obvious suggestion is that the ceramics come front a site, maybe on a neighbouring farm, that did not belong to the Fradin family. The tablets found in trays in outhouses of the Fradin farm, could be finds in storage prior to their‘discovery’ in the Champs des Morts. They clearly were in a very soft state and the apparent contradiction of finding aniline-dyed threads and fresh moss and grains buried in 2000-ycar-old ceramics could be resolved if they had been incorporated during storage and during excessive cleaning and home-made conservation treatments carried out on the very soft clay."

"The 1990 s reassessment of the site involved further TL which although showing many of the ceramics were recent, confirmed that some of them had been fired approximately 2000 years ago. The stones with Upper Palaeolithic-style engravings made with steel tools are almost certainly a modern addition, but the bone material is more problematic. As discussed above, the condition of the bones suggests that they almost certainly did not come from the site, and the Upper Palaeolithic style of many of the depictions on them make it unlikely that they were originally deposited together with the ceramic material about 2000 years ago, if indeed they are of any age at all."

The author then discusses the ceramics, pointing out that there are far too many symbols for them to be a genuine alphabetic system and speculating they might be the work of an Iron Age shaman who had had some contact with Phoenician writing in Western Mediterranean Greek and Phoenician temples. Doug Weller (talk) 08:58, 15 July 2015 (UTC)

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Paul Bahn and Colin Renfrew in 1999

Paul Bahn and Colin Renfrew wrote:

"the finds at Glozel constitute one of the most famous and most curious cases of faker)' in the history of archaeology. In the late 1920s an amazing assemblage of objects - badly-made pseudo-ice Age carvings and tools, pseudo-Bronze Age pots, and fired-clay tablets bearing a nonexistent script - emerged from a single field on a farm near Vichy. 'Glozelians' claimed them to represent a hitherto-unknown civilisation, while 'anti-Glozelians' dismissed the whole thing as a fraud. The International Commission, which included such luminaries of the time as Peyrony, Pittard, Hamal-Nandrin and Bosch Gimpera, as well as Garrod, investigated and produced a negative verdict amid claims that they themselves had salted the site with fakes to discredit the owners. Half-made objects were discovered in the local farm, and a court case ensued, in which the young farmer, Emile Fradin, was eventually acquitted through benefit of doubt. However, Garrod and the other members of the commission had no doubts as to who had made the forgeries (see Garrod 1968). The story then died down until the 1970s when the new dating technique of Thermoluminescence was applied to some fired-clay tablets from the site and produced a bewildering array of results, some between 700 BC and AD 100, which resurrected the controversy (see Daniel 1992, passim). These TL results have never been fully explained or published, and the whole affair has been left unresolved: to almost all archaeologists, Glozel is an impossibility, a fiasco, but the lunatic fringe see themselves as champions of the site against the blinkered dogma of orthodoxy." I've got a lot more, just saving this here. I'll add the source later, but a search would find it. Doug Weller talk 15:01, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

The English page could be greatly improved by using content from the French page. --Elnon (talk) 22:09, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

@Elnon: Thanks. I'm accumulating more material offline right now. This is a very short article at the moment on a very complicated situation. It's a bit like the Kensington Runestone in that respect, although here there are real artefacts etc and some forgeries. And no real archaeological site although the article makes it look as though there was one. Doug Weller talk 10:20, 2 May 2018 (UTC)

Dating the Tablets

Clearly the inscribed tablets are the most important issue. Yet the article does not make clear if the TL dating included a / some tablets, and what the results were. That 'some ceramics were TL dated' is not helpful, what is important is the date of the tablets - were some included in 'some ceramics' or not?Wolstan Dixie (talk) 11:42, 1 November 2021 (UTC)