Emile Fradin, peasant-proprietor of the Glozel hoard, died on February 10th, aged 103
DAWN springs up, and the plough-boy must be at work. So at first light on March 1st 1924 Emile Fradin, with his grandfather, harnessed the cows to till a field called Duranthon. A putain of a field, never ploughed before, strewn with rocks and slippy with clay sloping down into a ravine. The river Vareille flowed at the bottom, scraggy woods crowned the tops, in a four-house hamlet called Glozel in an unknown corner of the Allier 12 miles from Vichy in the very middle of France.
The field was all brambles, and the cattle struggled. One of them, Florence, stumbled into a hole, and the plough crashed sideways. But the hole, as Emile hauled the cow out, turned out to be an underground chamber containing axes, ceramic vases, strange scratched bricks and human bones. Emile smashed a few of the pots to see if there were coins inside; no luck. The glazed bricks that lined the chamber glistened in the sun.
Emile was 17 then, some years out of village school, with an early moustache and a ready, cheeky grin. By the time he was 25 he would have mixed with professors of prehistory and epigraphy from all over Europe, with the curator of the Louvre, with the premier archaeologists of France, and with the law. In his work-clothes and wooden sabots he watched the strangers come and dig his field, now renamed the Champ des Morts or Field of the Dead, from which in the end some 5,000 curious artefacts emerged. But the question that proved hardest to answer—over which students fought each other with stink-bombs, and butchers' boys wrestled in the Paris streets—was whether this was a genuine ancient burial, Neolithic or even Paleolithic, or whether young Mr Fradin had forged the lot himself.
The finds were hugely intriguing. Visitors to Mr Fradin's museum, admission four francs, would find—will still find—masks and carvings of faces without mouths; bones pierced with holes, with the sun's rays scratched round them; ceramic pots, schist rings, polished stones. Some figures were hermaphrodite idols, with phalluses in their foreheads. Several bone carvings showed reindeer running, though reindeer were thought to have died out in that part of France 10,000 years earlier. But most exciting were the dozens of square clay tablets inscribed with letters which, if Neolithic, predated by many millennia the Phoenician characters from which Western alphabets were supposed to have come—making Glozel, not the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilisation.
This extraordinary argument came originally from Antonin Morlet, a Vichy doctor and amateur archaeologist who took over the excavation. Emile had enlisted him, cycling over the hills to fetch him, because his father was threatening to plant the field. Dr Morlet paid the Fradins 200 francs a year to dig there, and wrote articles about the finds in Emile's name as well as his own. Emile thus became a scholar by association, signing his name with stylish swagger, though snobbish Parisians still thought him an “insolent” peasant boy.
Between 1926 and 1928 Dr Morlet brought in professionals. Some, including a committee of experts, thought the site was certainly Neolithic, though with a baffling admixture of Iron Age, Roman and medieval remains. Others dismissed it out of hand. Emile stuck to his story. When the curator of the Louvre mocked him he sued him for defamation, David against Goliath. When police, tipped off by the president of the French Prehistoric Society, raided his farmhouse-museum, carrying away even the saucepans in which his little brother had been mixing dirt, he yelled at them and was beaten for it. He was accused of creeping out at night to bury fresh-scratched stones, but no one proved it. He was formally charged with fraud, but all the charges were dismissed.
The chief of the Criminal Records Office in Paris, inspecting the alphabet tablets in 1928, said he found fresh grass in them, as well as apple stems and fibres from 20th-century clothes. But in 1982 a Swiss scholar thought the tablets and the letters came from Celtic times. Thermo-luminescence testing in 1973 suggested dates anywhere from 300BC to 1300ad; carbon-dating ranged from the 5th to the 15th century; the Ministry of Culture, in a curt résumé of 1995, concluded that the site was medieval. Mr Fradin sat tight, knowing that despite the improbabilities of the site—so much, from so many ages, all jumbled in one field—each piece that was declared genuinely old solidified his reputation. In 1990 he was awarded the Ordre des Palmes Académiques for his discovery. Though argument still raged, and continues to rage online, he felt vindicated.
He never sold a single item of the 5,000, though many people asked, and the money would have helped a farmer with a family. He kept the objects safe in their glass cases, some reverently laid on red cloth.
As for the field called Duranthon, he never ploughed it. It is archaeology that has broken up the hummocky ground. And only more impartial digging will resolve the mystery of Glozel. The misty March trees survey the ghosts of bone-men, Romans, Celts, medieval farmers, archaeologists in straw hats; and the young Emile Fradin, urging his team towards the secrets of the dead.