Certain characteristics of the [Golzel tomb] site placed it in the Neolithic era, approximately 10,000 B.C.E. But [amateur archaeologist Antonin ] Morlet also unearthed artifact types thought to have been invented thousands of years later, notably pottery and, most surprisingly, tablets or bricks with what looked like alphabetic characters. Some scholars cried foul, including experts on the inscriptions of the Phoenicians, the people thought to have invented the Western alphabet no earlier than 2000 B.C.E.Epigrapher René Dussaud concluded that "the so-called Glozel alphabet was a mishmash of previously known early alphabetic writing" and the archaeological commission that investigated concluded that "the site was 'not ancient.'"Was Glozel a stunning find with the capacity to rewrite prehistory? Or was it an elaborate hoax?
Prof. Sherman has a New Book out with the University of Chicago Press which delves into the Glozel controversy:
SensationsFollow the link for purchasing details.
French Archaeology between Science and Spectacle, 1890–1940
Daniel J. ShermanDelves into two controversies from the French archaeological world to illuminate the tension between the discipline’s scientific ambitions and its hunger for media attention.
For well over a century, from Heinrich Schliemann’s sensational discoveries at Troy in the 1880s, through the Tutankhamun excavations of the 1920s, to the recent LIDAR-aided uncovering of lost Maya cities, archaeology has made headlines. In this new history of archaeology and its archival traces, Daniel J. Sherman treats the friction between science and spectacle as constitutive of the field. By exploring two long-running controversies that roiled the French archaeological world and its wider public in the first third of the twentieth century, he gives the science/media relationship a unique place in the history of archaeology—and its present.
The first controversy involves a dispute over the conduct of excavations at Carthage in Tunisia, then under French colonial rule. In the second, accusations of forgery clouded what seemed to be a stunning Neolithic find at a hamlet called Glozel, in the Auvergne region in central France. The affair divided the scholarly community and attracted enormous media attention across Europe and North America. Both controversies occurred at a transitional moment between what has been called the heroic age of archaeology, dominated by explorers and adventurers with little specialized training, and the beginnings of its professionalization. As Sherman shows, the two affairs put the methods, procedures, and networks of archaeology in the spotlight and profoundly shaped its history.
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