- The Celts in France -
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 France (1905) - have ensured that links between these two intellectual traditions
have been maintained. Despite real successes in raising its profile in France'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 in favour of the wider European period divisions devised by O.Tischler, the
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