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Great story, and I love the title.

Tried to look around for some info on this story. So far only found one newspaper article, an obituary for Fradin, and a site in French which seems like it has some small pics of the language on the tablets.

One thing that interests me is the seeming back-and-forth of accusations of forgery, and assurances of the sites integrity, between different parties. In the newspaper article there are allusions to an argument between Fradin and Abbé Henri Breuil, a leading archaeologist, but it doesn't give any details. It also mentions Emile Esperandieu who apparently speculated on the point AC makes about "that would mean that the cradle of human civilisation was not the Middle East as everyone supposed, but Glozel - Emile Fradin's village".

My gut feeling is it's doubtful. I would love it to be true just for the story. I also wonder what kind of impact that might have on the Abrahamic religions as well. There seems to have been a mean-spiritedness towards the Glozel find, I wonder more broadly how much this site being verified as containing Neolithic items threated the established archaeological intelligensia. Maybe it was just jealously. What is clear is the people involved actually couldn't verify it's integrity, yet made absolute statements about it.

Looking forward to checking the film when I get in from work. Thanks Adam.

There's a quite good Wikipedia article on Glozel, fairly neutrally written, with some good links out to the weird and wonderful world of the Web (including here!)

I do miss this style of documentary making, almost everything from the 70s stands up in its peculiarly distanced point of view, removing any possibility of drama and replacing it with, for want of a better word, a picaresque narrative and narrator.

(Though I don't think I need to lecture Adam Curtis on that...)

I especially enjoyed the last ten minutes. The comportment, attire and speech patterns of those archeologists are shot through with a certain period (and a certain class of people) in a way written materials could never show.

This is a good site to go to :

It took a while to unearth the full secrets and story of Stonehenge and to unravel the Rosetta Stone so I'm sure a reasonably complete answer to Glozel will open up in the fullness of time. Religious worship is inevitably always at the heart of archeological understanding.

I would recommend the brilliant THE ORIGIN OF CONCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND by Julian Jaynes for an interesting interpretation of our recent past...and how we used to think.

Having just flipped my way through 100+ tv channels without finding a single thing worth watching it made me sad to be reminded of this excellent series. Would that programmes of this nature were still being made

In 2001, Channel 4's Time Team exposed an archeaological site in Wales as being a hoax.

The historical specimens were genuine, but their discovery in a Welsh valley was faked.
Could Glozel be an early example of this mischief-making?
Good site here:


Dorothy Garrod - (what a strikingly handsome woman.)A British archaeologist dragged into the controversy:

Although it didn't damage her career.

I am aware that this is completely off-topic, but I could find no better place to ask my question - it seems the Ö÷²¥´óÐã is airtight when it comes to asking questions about its documentaries. My qustion regards your series "Century of the Self", more precisely episode 2 - on minute 9 or 10, there is a song playing in the background. It is awfully familiar, yet I cant remember where from. Could you maybe tell me what song it is? Thank you very much.

And if my post is seen as inappropriate and removed, please be so kind as to tell me where I might direct my question in a more efficient manner. Thank you again.

Fascinating stuff as ever. I believe that the Glozel Find was generally held to be quite significant in the field of 'mystery archaeology' in the 1970's, but has since faded from interest. I first read of it in Francis Hitching's World Atlas of Mysteries (publ. 1979), which belongs to a certain subgroup of late 70's era publications that followed in the footsteps of French writers like Charroux and Pauwels and Bergier who tended to combine instances of Fortean peculiarity with a certain degree of rational analysis of their subject matter. In the book (which doesn't, it must be said, make a great case for the find's authenticity), Glozel shares space with material that once seemed mysterious but has now been resolved more satisfactorily than could have been foreseen in the 70's (the disappearance of Col. Fawcett in South America, the decline of the Neanderthals, and, it almost goes without saying, the mysteries of Stonehenge, for instance), with material that remains controversial (the mystery of Kaspar Hauser, the identity - or otherwise - of King Arthur) and certain pieces that were clearly considered of great interest to the 70's audience but have not continued to exercise much interests amongst 'anomalous history' investigative types, such as the Soviet theory of the Earth being enclosed within a crystal latticework, and Velikovsky's redating of Ancient Egyptian history and Old Testament chronology on the basis of identifying global upheaval linked to Venus as a one - time rogue planet. In the book's defence, there are (even in the late 70's) already certain stories which it takes pains to debunk - these include such perennials as the mysteries of the Mary Celeste and the Bermuda Triangle. In that sense, the Glozel story is given the benefit of the doubt.

Personally, I have always loved these particular kind of 70's era fascinations, which appear to me to be some kind of hangover from certain late 60's preoccupations with the transcendent and the extraterrestrial, later refracted further through 70's obsessions with the occult and early environmental awareness. Although we now live in a society that is awash with conspiracy theory and pseudo-archaeological thought, none of it quite posseses the innocency and yet, at the same time, academic respectability of much of this earlier material. I think it's worth remembering that one of the most widespread current conspiracy theories of the early 21st century (that enshrined in Dan Brown's 'Da Vinci Code') relating to the secret society The Priory of Sion and the hidden bloodline of Jesus's family, all derives ultimately from a programme made for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã Chronicle series by Henry Lincoln in the early 70's, with a very similar feel to the Glozel doc that Adam is showcasing here. Lincoln based his research on a small paperback of the Charroux variety published in France in the late 60's by one Gerard de Sede (who made a small industry out of these things) that he'd read when he'd been on holiday.

Hi DerekMc…

re your comment #6…

As much as one admires the tenacious speed and findings on their projects The Time Team do have the advantage of extensive pre-production research before the start of filming. That is to say they more or less know what they are looking for in a short period of time to confirm or disprove or embellish existing knowledge of the historical record. I know you know this, but it is still worth a reminder since in our modern age there is an all too easy approach to problems, namely the "surely it's just a case of pressing the right button" answer....No Pejorative or supercilious critique intended.....

I’m not sure what the French ‘will’ to finding out a modern solution is in this case but extensive and costly multi-disciplinary research, including detailed forensic and geographical analysis, is surely required to tie a story for our times together. Whether this is happening or not I have no idea. It will probably be up to wealthy and inquisitive Americans to pursue as it was with Shakespeare. However it is very very unlikely to alter what we do know about the modern homo sapien sapien scientific record since this is nailed down genetically and present in the migratory archaeological and fossil records. Though truth can be stranger than fiction there will be a factual answer to this ‘mystery’ - even if it does turn out to be a hoax which would be a staggering and interesting indictment to the story it certainly wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened.

I am reminded of the Piltdown Man hoax which began in 1912 and was solved in the early 1950s. Maybe ‘we’ just have a bigger, more pragmatic and longer lasting appetite for finding solutions to historical conundrums than the French do! Pardonnez-moi…. Messieurs et Mesdames…

I found it. It was not listed as such on Wikipedia, the only website listing the soundtrack. Which contributes to this being one of my favorite documentaries of all time, if not the one. It is "spiegel im spiegel" by arvo part.

The whole thing reeks of BS. Looking at the wiki article it said that by 1979 thermoluminescence dating had taken place on 27 of the artifacts. The dates of these objects are all over the place: 300BC to 300AD, 13th Century, and very recent. The carbon dating on the bone fragments is just as varied: 13th Century right up to the 20th. Little Émile Fradin is a hoaxer, methinks.

There's an obit of Fradin in the current issue of the ever-dependable Fortean Times.
Although the chamber had some strange and old objects in when Fradin found it, most of the really weird stuff - cabbalistic signs, hermaphrodite idols, undecipherable tablets - only emerged after a local amateur archaeologist, Antonin Morlet, paid Fradin 200 francs to 'excavate' there. The Occam's razor solution is that Morlet introduced most of the baffling 'finds'.

In regard to a minor point in The Art Teacher's comments which I missed on the first read-through: it is interesting to me that the newspaper argument brought in the Abbe Breuil as an authority. He was one of the most significant early analysts of the meaning of Paleolithic cave paintings in the 20th century, and was significantly involved in popularising the existence of paleolithic works at the sites of Altamira and Lascaux to the wider world (he also knew and worked with Teilhard de Chardin). Amongst other ideas, Breuil was the first to suggest that the cave paintings had once held power in the rituals of imitative hunting magic, that the recesses of the caves had served as symbolic (womblike) regions of (spiritual) rebirth for participants in ritual, and that evidence for shamanistic practice was clearly depicted on the cave walls. In course of time, many of Breuil's own ideas have been refined or repudiated by later paleontologists who have preferred to stress the ideas that the cave paintings are merely inventories of animal types, records of actual hunting expeditions, proto-linguistic usages (i.e. sign symbols designed to stand for reference to other objects) and so on, and downgraded the idea that the caves served as repositories of shamanistic magic. The debate continues.

But I found it interesting as a reminder that even the supposedly mainstream archaeological findings of a Breuil (or, indeed, a Dorothy Garrod) might have been held to have been authoritative forty or fifty years ago, but would now be brought into question.

Anyway, that's who Breuil was.

Thanks for the info Leeravitz, very interesting.

No debate about mystery archaeology can be complete without mentioning Erich von Daniken - a must read for a certain type of 70s nerdy schoolboy.

But seriously, the balance of probabilities - or improbabilities, if you like - is usually overlooked by documentaries (and much worse, news programmes). All you need to do in a documentary in order to make an instant mystery is put one expert up against another or one fact against another. The viewer who is passively watching does not have time to analyse or ask questions before the story moves on.

In the 70s a Ö÷²¥´óÐã Chronicle programme covered Glozel and at the time it was considered pretty certainly to be a complete fraud. There is a chapter on this in the book accompanying the series - 'Chronicle' publ by the Ö÷²¥´óÐã 1978, ISBN 0563174838.