Glozel artifacts

[1] Promoted by their discoverers as proof of an advanced prehistoric civilization, the finds initiated a series of claims and counterclaims.

Adrienne Picandet, a local teacher, visited the Fradins' farm in March, and afterwards informed the Minister of Education about the site.

On July 9, another teacher, Benoit Clément, visited the Fradins representing the Société d'Émulation du Bourbonnais, later returning with a man called Viple.

The January issue of the Bulletin de la Société d'Émulation du Bourbonnais mentioned the finds, intriguing Antonin Morlet, a Vichy physician and amateur archaeologist.

Morlet identified the site as Neolithic in a report entitled Nouvelle Station Néolithique published in September 1925, with Émile Fradin listed as co-author.

The authors suggest that the site is medieval (roughly A.D. 500–1500), possibly containing some earlier Iron Age objects, but was likely enriched by forgeries.

Morlet invited a number of archaeologists to visit the site during 1926, including Salomon Reinach, curator of the National Museum of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, who spent three days excavating.

At the meeting of the International Institute of Anthropology in Amsterdam, held in September 1927, Glozel was the subject of heated controversy.

During their three-day excavation campaign, the archaeologists were observed by spectators, who were by now flocking to the site, finding various artifacts, but in their report of December 1927, the commission declared everything at Glozel with the exception of a few pieces of flint axes and stone were fake.

[8] Glass found at Glozel was dated spectrographically in the 1920s, and again in the 1990s at the SLOWPOKE reactor at the University of Toronto by neutron activation analysis.

There were numerous claims of decipherment, including identification of the language of the inscriptions as Basque, Chaldean, Eteocretan, Hebrew, Iberian, Latin, Berber, Ligurian, Phoenician and Turkic.