Chatillon-sur-Seine (France) (AFP)
The "Lady of Vix" has not said everything: 66 years after the discovery in Burgundy of the tomb of this Celtic princess and its famous treasure, archaeologists reopen the old excavations, sloppy at the time, to illuminate history of an ancient society still unknown.
During the winter of 1953, in the middle of a field near the sources of the Seine, a professor and a farm worker bring out of the mud a vast grave where a woman buried, buried around 500 BC, on a tank, richly adorned, next to a gigantic Greek crater 1.64 meters high - the largest bronze vase of antiquity.
It is considered as the greatest Celtic discovery of the 20th century in France. The "Lady of Vix" made the front page of Paris Match, stamps with his effigy are printed ... But the excavations are quickly and poorly done: pieces and bones torn from the burial, hastily transported to the museum, and after three weeks, everything is re-buried under the ground.
"These excavations were dramatic, even for the time," regrets Bruno Chaume, archaeologist at the CNRS. Many elements are today impossible to study because poorly preserved, like the interior of the famous vase, literally stripped, leaving no trace of the contained drink.
And, above all, the funerary monument itself has been forgotten: no overview, stratigraphic survey ... "We do not know what this tomb looked like: for lack of real elements, the tumulus which covered the monument, the burial chamber, were imagined without having been searched, "explains Dominique Garcia, president of the National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap).
Hence the idea of reopening excavations. "A first in France on such an exceptional site," says Dominique Garcia. Classified as a historical monument, Vix's tomb was "frozen" but its "empty" file, and the museum housing its treasures could only tell the story of objects, probably idealized.
The new project aims to integrate the tomb - located at the foot of the ancient city of Vix - in its socio-economic context, to be able to "tell the story of these Celtic societies" from the end of the first Iron Age (800 to 460 BC), this culture of central-western Europe called Hallstatt, named after a site unearthed in Austria.
- "Princely phenomenon" -
First signs have already appeared since the reopening in mid-August of the excavations. "We now know that 100% of the stones were brought on site to erect the tumulus", now leveled but which was to reach six to eight meters high, welcomes Bastien Dubuis, who directs the operation for Inrap.
Bringing these stones to birth meant a specific organization within an aristocratic society, "pyramid and slavery" - which historians call "princely phenomenon" - adds Catherine Monnet, director of the Châtillonnais Country Museum - Trésor de Vix.
Another discovery on this vast necropolis of 2,000 square meters: near the tomb, a second monument, perhaps a secondary tomb, a podium dedicated to the funeral ceremony of the princess, or the tumulus of one of his ancestors "for to prove that his power came from a wide line ", assumes the head of the museum.
In light of new research, the results of which should be known in the course of 2020, archaeologists hope to better understand the connections between the ancient city of Vix, the center of an important power controlling the Seine valley, and the Mediterranean civilization.
The presence of the Greek crater, a pure object of prestige, Baltic amber jewelery, a golden torque, testifies to the will of the elite to express its power by "paying itself a premium craft, local or exotic, "says Dominique Garcia.
By its location, on the borders of the great rivers of Europe, Vix operated "as a hub between the North and the Mediterranean". "For a long time, we have divided culturally + peoples colonizers +, Greeks and Romans, and Celts," he says. "But Vix teaches us that there were no peripheral or central populations, but connected peoples for economic reasons."
© 2019 AFP