Manganism? – like you need a hole in the head!

Trepanned skull from La Caouna de Moux. Narbonne Museum.

The hills across the valley,  Les Montagnes Noires,  hold a wealth of megaliths – and for many good reasons. Their upland pastures were once rich grazing land for sheep and goats, and their holm-oak and chestnut forests were in early times, plentiful sources of food for animals and humans alike. Springs are numerous and the slopes face south. But much more importantly these Minervois hills contained a wealth of minerals – from Europe’s biggest current gold-mine to ancient deposits of copper and manganese. Mines and shafts, grottes and avens abound -

These were from our recent visit to the dolmen and menhir at Fournes-Cabardès.

The menhir has subsided, as an aven opened up beneath it – we hoped the cross was erected simply to display a warning notice . . . but it could mark the grave of another foolhardy megalith-hunter who ducked under the fence.

However, the arrival of metallurgy in the late Neolithic/Chalcolithic era – as with all new technologies – brought bad with the good.

Here’s the bad news : ‘Exposure to manganese dusts and fumes should not exceed the ceiling value of 5 mg/m3 even for short periods because of its toxicity level. Manganese poses a particular risk for children due to its propensity to bind to CH-7 receptors. Manganese poisoning has been linked to impaired motor skills and cognitive disorders.

‘In 2005, a study suggested a possible link between manganese inhalation and central nervous system toxicity in rats. It is hypothesized that long-term exposure to the naturally-occurring manganese in shower water puts up to 8.7 million Americans at risk.
‘A form of neurodegeneration similar to Parkinson’s Disease called “Manganism” has been linked to manganese exposure amongst miners and smelters since the early 19th Century. Allegations of inhalation-induced manganism have been made regarding the welding industry.
Manganism or manganese poisoning is a toxic condition resulting from chronic exposure to manganese and first identified in 1837 by James Couper. Its symptoms resemble those of idiopathic Parkinson’s disease, which it is often misdiagnosed as, although there are particular differences in both the symptoms (nature of tremors, for example). It is characterized by muscle rigidity, tremor, a slowing of physical movement (bradykinesia) and, in extreme cases, a loss of physical movement (akinesia). Symptoms are also similar to Lou Gehrig’s disease and multiple sclerosis – Maladie de Charcot (Charcot’s disease) – spasticity or stiffness in the arms and legs; and overactive tendon reflexes. Patients may present with symptoms as diverse as a dragging foot, unilateral muscle wasting in the hands, or slurred speech.’

Manganese compounds were in use in prehistoric times; paints that were pigmented with manganese dioxide can be traced back 17,000 years. But the mania for metals, mining, minerals and metallurgy was unprecedented in the chalcolithic and bronze ages. One French historian looks no further than this : “One of the strangest practices, which may also be linked to a religious aspect, remains the trepanation that was practiced on Les Grandes Causses.  It should be noted that trepanations were performed on both  the dead and the living, and individuals of all ages – which strengthens the religious hypothesis : the hole in the skull is intended to allow the escape of the spirit. Some subjects were even drilled twice. A very high percentage of these crude operations, using a flint drill, were successful – it is estimated at 70%.”

Like us then,  the effects of coal and petrol, uranium and microwaves, was not noticed until it was too late. And we had our own religion to explain it all away: it was Progress.

As usual, there’s a page attached to this post – it’s La Caouno de Moux Page, where the trepanned crania were found.  There’s not a lot more to add – just a hundred or so bodies, in a hidden chamber beneath a sealed entrance . . . oh – and another, bigger, hole in the head.

Dolmen de Boun Marcou

When I first started exploring this whole area around Mailhac, and learnt that an oppidum was not a Roman fort but a Chalcolithic hill settlement, and that there was not just one but three necropoli, and that there existed a cave by a spring, and that there was a dolmen there too, and that the whole affair had been evolving and developing for a thousand years – I realised that getting all the information and photos and maps for the whole complex was going to stretch my abilities at ‘blorganisation’.

And so it proved : there are now posts and pages that don’t seem to come in any order, nor seem shaped in any cohesive way. I’m more of a reader than a librarian or a methodical historian. I’m hoping the tags will sort it all out, and that the grouping of all the topics under a ‘parent page’ will gather most of it together.

And consistent with this inconsistency, I shall now introduce the writer who introduced me to the whole subject of protohistory – who, fittingly was not an archaeologist at all, but an American and a poet : Gustaf Sobin. The book is ‘Luminous Debris. Reflecting on Vestige in Provence and Languedoc’. It was a propitious find in a Carcassonne second-hand bookshop. It is by turns dense, lively, academic, joyful – his chapter on Mailhacian pottery and its pictographs was exhilarating speculation and has inspired in me what I hope will be a life-long interest.

It sent me immediately to search the Internet – where I found references to the ‘vieux village ‘, and to the Grotte de Treille , and finally to the dolmen of Boun Marcou on a small hill called Trigodinnas, right next to Lou Cayla.

View from the chevet or headstone, to the foot.

For more on this go to Boun Marcou dolmen, Mailhac Page.

The Fournès dolmen and menhir and how to tell them apart.

Up ’til this morning I was unaware of the existence of Fournès-Cabardès ( the difference, were you wondering, between è and é, is that between the vowel-sounds of ‘may’ and ‘egg’. Not a lot to us, but of great matter to the French. Say ‘may’ and your jaw drops – say ‘egg’ and your mouth widens. Crucial. If you live here).

I was living in happy ignorance also, that there were two megaliths close-by. But now that I have been there and seen them I am no longer happy – because They, the French mapmakers IGN, have got the pair of megaliths all wrong, back-asswards, vice-versa and widdershins.

The Captain, over at Megalithic Portal, of course had it right all along : the site to the west marked dolmen, is in fact a 4 metre long monolith, fallen half out of a fearsome-looking entrance hole to Hades.

While the Pierre Plantée (stretch the mouth just a leetel wider . . . ) with its massive cap-stone, and solitary orthostat, and S-W orientation, better merits the name dolmen.

I’m not sure how The Captain came upon the reference to Peyregat menhir – because there’s no such place in the region – but somewhere in the archives of the Carcassonne scientific society  SESA of which I am a member, there are photos which I will unearth asap : Fournes-Cabardès – Menhir couché au lieudit Peyregat. Vues du nord-ouest et du sud-est, 8 x 11 cm, photographies de Germain Sicard prises le 9 mars 1897.

But for more modern photos and info on this impressive stone – look in the Peyregat Menhir Page.

For more of the same on the Fournès ( jaw just a leetel lower . . . ) dolmen – go to the Fournès Dolmen Page. Lesson concluded, you may relax now.

Lou Cayla, Mailhac : one of The High Places

Les hauts lieux.

French is an impoverished language. Its dictionaries are a third smaller than ours, but it still manages to be poetic and expressive. So when I say I’ve just visited one of ‘les hauts lieux ‘ I don’t mean an arduous climb. I’ve just explored one of the great places in the south of France – massive, significant and important. But for all this it is still a low-lying, modest site with little to distinguish it from the landscape around.

The story is both extraordinary and humdrum. A fourteen-year-old girl, Odette Taffanel, begins to find things in her family’s vineyards in 1929. After the War, in 1948, she starts taking it seriously. In the 50’s she ropes in her younger brother Jean. Their work together unearths one of the biggest late bronze/early iron age sites in the Midi. Archaeologists flock to the site, and careers are made. She is awarded the Legion d’Honneur . The site and its findings are considered so significant that ‘Mailhacais’ becomes a benchmark for pottery and funerary rites in the Urn-Field culture of southern France. At 93, she is still writing and publishing – and still receiving visitors at her house in the village.

Photo of a grave emplacement – Necropolis  Bassin 1

But the story of Lou Cayla goes back further than the Ancien Village – it starts with water from an abundant spring, a grotto, and a dolmen, all on the same small insignificant hill.

For more info and photos on all these aspects, see the Lou Cayla Parent Page.

La Pierre Replantée

Without Quid I would never have found many of these places here in my region. Every village – and France is essentially a network of villages – has a dossier listing its vital statistics and attributes. La Mairie collects the data and sends it to Paris, whence it is diffused back to the Nation. Decade upon decade – possibly since Napoleon began pulling France into a coherent unity – facts accrete. Nothing is altered or thrown away: it is all on file. Real life, however, tends to subvert the system: place-names change through metathesis [a sound change that alters the order of phonemes in a word] or the persistence or resurgence of regional dialect. Cartographers register some changes – and ignore others. Things do get lost. Farmers alter the landscape, burying or unearthing the past. Road-builders bulldoze the past into a ditch. Which is where I found this massive standing stone yesterday.

For more info and photos – go to La Pierre Plantée Olonzac Page.

Ordinary Old Stones

We live in Stone Country. I have attempted to get beyond ‘limestone’ and ’sandstone’ and can just about tell my nummulithic from your oolithic – but I soon find myself in alien territory, where they speak like this : ‘ . . . the origin of the paleodoline is interpreted as resulting from a combination of Eocene synorogenic tectonics . . .’ It’s too late to learn a new language like this.

But I was delighted to discover that les lauses – thick flat slabs of schist that tile the roof of the 13th. C. Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Centeilles are phonoliths : they ‘ring’ when tapped. I had come to the little church only because there were prehistoric vestiges in the area, but the time spent tramping through the vines and the garrigue convinced me that this was a rather extraordinary place : there is an unusual amount of context – geographic and historic, and lithic. The sheer amount of stones around Centeilles is astonishing, and attests to a continuous inhabitation since neolithic times.

This was taken from the top of a walled area of stone 15 metres wide by twenty metres long. There is another in the background – also 4 metres high. They are all that remain of a neolithic settlement.

More ‘modern’ are the capitelles that cluster round the chapel, the dolmen, the well and the spring :

There are fourteen of these clochán, or beehive huts visible from the path. Usually they are isolated shelters for shepherds and in more recent times, for fieldworkers. Here their use ranges over the millennia from hermitages to pilgrim huts to transhumant herders’ lodgings during mediaeval Fairs.

See the Capitelles de Centeilles Page for more.

Sacred Stones and Holy Water, at Centeilles

In the XIII century, (some texts say the XII century) La Chapelle de Notre-Dame de Centeilles was built close to the site of a romanesque chapel, or of a Roman villa. Throughout the Middle Ages Centeilles was the centre of a thriving community on the trail between plain and mountain and was the focus of an important fair and market on 25th and 26th March. It was also a centre of pilgrimage for Ascension Day, with its Procession of the Rogations, and Assumption Day.

The first fresco to face the weary pilgrim was that of St. Christopher, patron saint of travellers.

La Révolution put an end to this tradition – the human population deserted it, and it was used as a barn. For the next one hundred years it was occupied by sheep. It was sold in 1960, for 500 francs. to the Diosese of Narbonne who later handed it over to Les Amis de Centailles, an association that undertook its repair and upkeep.

The early christian church had not chosen this place at random – it was a site of sacred significance since the earliest times. For wherever Our Lady has been installed and adored it is certain that she replaced a pre-christian animist or fertility cult – usually of Cybele, or Potnia Theron, the Queen of the Animals – one of the myriad names of the Mother Goddess.

For more photos and info- see the Chapelle de Centeilles Page

unfound stones

I have yet to return empty-handed from a day of dolmen-hunting, even if I fail to find anything. The map may say ‘Pierre Droite’ but a tractor or a religion may have removed it.

I have searched repeatedly for these, and will continue until I find their ‘presence’ or the reason for their absence. These searches uncover places and reveal people: Germain, an old man with passionate memories of a megalithic necropolis discovered as a young man up on les Causses de La Planette - meeting him up in the hills has set in motion a whole new area of reseach.

This Easter, we went looking for le dolmen de Combe Violon above La Livinière, but a cold wet wind cut short the search. The dolmens de Mousse were not far away but again it was too cold to stay – even though we were close to hell. L’Enfer is a barren hillside of white jumbled rubble, a petrified torrent of shattered limestone that resolves into walls and tumuli and capitelles –

Just beyond is the hillside that contains les dolmens de Mousse and le grand dolmen de Lauriol – but not for us that day. I returned to the internet to research these dolmens – and discovered that someone else was up there that afternoon – Yves Le Pestipon had posted photos of them on a remarkable multi-author weblog called L’Astrée.net – an unfolding series of events and situations, writings and images – including many on megalithic culture.

Shopping for dolmens

Today I set out with this little shopping list :

Quarante (village in Minervois-Herault)
Vestiges préhistoriques et antiques

* Habitats chalcolithiques : Bel Air, Fontanche.
* Dolmen de Pech Ménel.
* Cromlech de Malviés.
* Cachette de fondeur (fin âge du Bronze) à Bellevue.
* 35 villas romaines principalement : Pech Ménel, La Massale, Saint-Fréchoux, Les Clapiers, Parazols, Les Sèmièges, La Condamine de Rivière, Les Commandeurs, La Barreire.
* Tombes wisigothiques : Souloumiac, Parazols, Grange Haute, Saint-Barthélemy, Saint-Martin, Saint-Fréchoux.
* Les Huyères : ancien fief seigneurial ; cimetière abandonné, 3 silos.
* Nécropole à incinération du type “Champ d’Urnes” du 1er âge du Fer au lieu dit Recobre (35 tombes, mobilier au musée de Narbonne).

But I have learnt to take all this with a large pinch of ‘hand-crafted’ salt from Gruissan.
I set out with high hopes – while fully concious that half of this guff has been cobbled together from old documents, and that in the land-rush of the 1970’s any old stone that happened to be sitting in a field growing lichen was bulldozered into the ditch to make way for the Great New Wines of Languedoc.

Now that the grants have dried up – and so have some of the French (they are no longer drinking three times their body-weight in wine per annum – man, woman and child) – it may be too late.
I only managed to find one of these sites.

The dig at Pech Ménel

And even if it was a dismal collection of stones, and even if I did have to cross vineyards to interview every person I saw on the landscape, only to hear that No: they had never heard of any neolithic site, or stone alignment, or dolmen, or prehistoric settlement, and that they had a) Lived here all their lives or b) Just moved to the area …. it didn’t matter. The day was sunny and calm and just about every heap of stones spoke volumes about mediaeval toil – and never mind the prehistory.

Three capitelles at Fontanche – field stones cleared and structured as shelters.

So: no cromlech at Malvies today – and there was no one in at the Chateau to ask. But a stone circle down here in the Midi – now that is worth going back for.
No visible neolithic habitat, either, at Bel-Air. As for Fontanche, this wine-domain seemed deserted – yet there, parked in a weedy courtyard was a beautifully restored 1960’s BMW 600 series . . . There wasn’t time to explore the Iron Age necropolis at “the place called ‘Recobre’” with its Urn-field vestiges. But now that I know the lie of the land I’ll be able to make more focussed enquiries.
While the under-30’s with paid jobs were stacked up over the thermal-ridges in their paragliders, and the retired over 60’s were reliving their cycling-club heydays, in packs of bulgey yellow lycra [this is France-Partout, au weekend] the poor vignerons are still hard at work, pruning the vines or cleaning vats – and answering idiot questions from foreigners about old stones. Yes – there was a dolmen. And a dig had started last summer and the man to ask was an historian I’d come across before – Jacques Gatorze, of Cessenon.

I had forgotten how awful a dig looks : the steel pegs, the string and the plastic. I rather wish I hadn’t come across it like this: a crime-scene in the undergrowth.
Perhaps I am a Romantic, and not the Classicist I pretend to be.

More on the Pech Ménel dolmen page >

Hunting for the Allee Couverte du Bois de Monsieur

There are few people to be seen out on the Causses of the Minervois or the hills of the Corbières, at this, or any other time of the year. In twelve months one might encounter a dozen other walkers. It’s a real and rare pleasure to be out in the wilds on my own. But I have to remind myself that I am not alone: there are others out there, and they are dangerous. Some may be five times my weight, and angry. Some may weigh less than me, but they are armed and stupid. Between the wild boars and the hunters, I’m at risk. The autumn/winter season is not over ’til the end of this month.

A hunter’s stand above Assignan

There are one and a half million chasseurs in France. In the 2006/2007 season they killed 466,352 sangliers out of a population of over a million. The mortality rate is decreasing (for humans, that is) – from 40 per year to 25 recently. All of them hunters. Of 142 people wounded – 12 were non-hunters. Two weeks ago, not far from here, a hunter panicked when a boar charged him. He killed his companion with an accidental blast. In 2005, Claude Rossetti of Montlaur three villages away, was killed while gathering mushrooms on Alaric mountain. He was shot accidentally by an ex-gendarme who was out hunting alone, illegally, on a day when boar-hunting is forbidden. One son, Sylvain, has started a national movement called Partageons La Nature – Share Nature, in an effort to bring an end to unnecessary death and injury.

cartridge cases below the shooting platform

His other son, Claude, wrote recently about the shooting in understandable – if barely intelligible – anger : – ‘ pour son acte heroique il a ete condamne a 6 mois de prison ferme amenageable ( autrement dit RIEN ) dans l’ aude il n y a pas de jour de non chasse quand ce n’est pas le petit c’est le gros gibier et en plus on chasse partout route chemin garrigue public prive et meme a n importe quelle heure du jour ou de la nuit dans l aude si lon n est pas chasseur on est rien . . . ‘
‘ there’s no day when there’s no hunting . . . ‘ – ‘ they’re hunting anywhere public land private land . . . at any time of the day or night . . . ‘ – ‘ if you’re not a hunter here – you’re nobody . . . ‘
The rules governing la chasse au sanglier have been tightened following this and other incidents – spot-checks for permits, and regulation orange vests and hats. But it is a macho culture where drinking plays a big role. I keep alert, fear the guns more than the tusks, and look forward to March.

Meanwhile there is the joy of being out in this landscape with such stones.

a borie or stone shelter in the causses of Minervois

This is all that remains of the Allée Couverte du Bois de Monsieur :-

Do you really want directions?
OK. Drive out of Agel on the D20, past Le Moulin de Madame. Somewhere along here the road turns into the D128. Fork L onto the D26 and go thru the hamlet of La Roueyre and on past La Grotte du Gourp des Boeufs, where the road morphs into the D177. You can do all this without knowing any of this – basically you’ve just gone from Agel to Assignan. The dolmen is in the far corner of the last vineyard on the left, down the track on the left after the pond above the village. It lies at 2.52′40″ E , 43.23′50″ N.

I came here armed with just one sentence gleaned from a 1962 ‘account of the activities of a member of the Societé d’ Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude‘. In a paper he gave on the prehistoric relics of the region, he noted four sad, forgotten and neglected dolmens in the Minervois. One of them was the Allée Couverte du Bois de Monsieur, 500 metres off the Assignan to Coulouma road, on a ‘petit mamelon.’
Now, every maquis-covered bump in this landscape could be described as a ‘little breast’. So I assiduously fossicked over all the more likely ones – before doing the sensible thing : ask a local. The local turned out to be Monsieur Donnadieu, the mayor of Pardailhan (not of Donnadieu, which is a hameau nearby). And a font of information on all things historical in the neighbourhood. I managed to stem the flow with a promise to return soon – and got back up the road to a hill that resembled no breast I had ever known.
The dolmen is not marked on any map. The Bois de Monsieur is not mentioned on any plan cadastral. The breast at best is but a chest.
And the Allée Couverte – is just one last large orthostat surrounded by a heap of jumbled slabs. From the angle of the sun the dolmen is facing SW.
Move along now, folks. Nothing more to see.