Diane Olivier, a Californian Plein Air artist with many years experience drawing the rugged landscapes of America and France, expressed genuine puzzlement recently here : how can I tell if a pile of stones really is a dolmen. And just this week a dinnerparty guest could barely conceal her disbelief that I had turned up yet another ‘long-lost dolmen’. It could be just a pile of stones.

These are legitimate concerns : the dolmens of our region are frequently among the smallest in France, and seem to bear little relation to the massive structures in Brittany and elsewhere across Europe – and they are often severely degraded through weathering and ransacking.

Now – there is a local amateur historian who is very keen to establish a second dolmen on the hill above his village of Félines-Corbières – and even includes it on his local walking-guide. Last summer I swallowed the lure and went looking – but saw only a heap of stones. It lacked all three of the basic requirements : 1 – at least two stones embedded and upright in a recognisable configuration. 2 – a clearly discernable orientation somewhere between south-east and south-west. And 3 – preferably some previous mention : it is highly unlikely that a ‘new’ dolmen is going to turn up, without having been noticed by previous generations of shepherds, chasseurs, or gentlemen-scientists.

There are other indicators that may not always be present : a tumulus (usually about 10 metres across in our region) is a sure sign that this was a communal tomb constructed by the clan. The location can rule a heap of stones out, too : dolmens are rarely sited in a valley or ground-depression – they usually command a view to the south, and are frequently midway up a slope. The location of his dolmen – three metres from the edge of a cliff – should have alerted him : there is no room for any entrance-way, or tumulus – let alone any space for the ritual that surely accompanies the ceremony of interring the dead. In this instance, it was one eroded vestige of a small upright slab, surrounded by a random pile of irregular stones : with no tomb-area, or cella, within (usually 1 metre wide and at least 3 metres long).

The three Dolmens de la Forêt – a case in point.

I came across a brief mention of these in a 1979 publication : L’Aude Préhistorique – Inventaire des Gisements Préhistoriques, Carcassonne. Michel Barbaza. (Atacina No. 9) They were said to be ‘near the farm called la Forêt’, up above La Causse de Siran. One was given a precise location just 20 metres from the roadside. I had no expectation of finding it though, as one look at the area was enough : it had been bulldozed under. The screen-capture below shows the terrain, with the characteristic contour-lines of the Forestry Commission plantation.

I printed this out and had a quick look for it anyway, a few weeks ago as I was passing through : sure enough, all around waypoint LF1 (bottom left) there was nothing but slabs of limestone – rows upon rows of possible orthostats and capstones, but nothing I could claim was in any kind of alignment, or showing any orientation.

The video below was taken last saturday, a little further up the hill. It shows the type of ground I usually encounter, and the typical experiences I undergo as ‘possibles’ turn into ‘impossibles’ :-

As can be seen on my screen-map, above, there are many more places to search – but I left them for another visit, and turned my attention to the one dolmen of the three that was briefly singled out in Barbaza’s Inventaire. It was said to be near the cliffs that give on to La Gorge de la Cesse, at a place called ‘Pas-Grand’. Unfortunately no such place is marked on the IGN Carte. But in toponymy, a ‘pas’ signifies either a pass (through mountains, or across a ravine, or across water as in Pas-de-Calais), or possibly a foot-print (as in a headland). There are a number of such promontories around la ferme de la Forêt – so I picked the nearest and put in some waymarks for the GPS – LF6 and 7.

But my recent expedition with daughter Jessica to find the Fournes dolmens, had made me concious that some tumuli have become overgrown and no longer show up as white. So while continuing to enter ‘possibles’ as waypoints, I began to study closely every single element in the satellite picture. And that’s how I found the dolmen – from 888 metres up, and without leaving home.

Now it’s your turn to play Spot The Dolmen! [Hint – it’s not any of those white blobs.]

Of course, I entered my guess into the GPS – and last saturday I walked straight to it. But what I found was quite a shock – it looked like I had found a one-stone dolmen.

Can a single stone – with no tumulus and very little ‘documentation’ – be considered an authentic dolmen? You can judge for yourselves on the La Forêt Dolmen Page, to the right.

So, of the three dolmens, there’s the one I found, the one ploughed under – and the third remains ‘at large’.

If God had not decided to spend this Saturday morning on perfecting His juggling skills, with my four geostationary satellites – I would never have found the long-lost last two dolmens of Mousse.

The three dolmens of Mousse have been causing grief to just about everyone who ever went looking for them, since the late 1800’s. Jean Miquel de Barroubio mentions a long ‘allée couverte’ among the many dolmens of St.-Julien des Meulieres, in 1896. But this group of three dolmens seems to have evaded the searches of Cazalis de Fondouce and Laurent-Mathieu, in the 1920’s – and even le Docteur Arnal in his forays up and down les Causses de Siran in 1946.

More recently they eluded ‘The Captain’ (early founder-member of The Megalithic Portal, and an experienced and indefatigable dolmen-researcher and tracker) who tramped in high summer the blinding rivers of limestone karst – called la Combe des Morts – in vain. Bruno Marc, our ‘regional expert’ on ‘all things megalithic’ does not seem to bother with these sad, lost, broken down old tombs. And who can blame him when the real archaeologists of the region show no interest in what is on their doorsteps?

Why nothing has been written about all these lost dolmens – since Jean Guilaine and Paul Ambert studied the prehistoric vestiges of the Minervois and the Corbières in depth in the late ’60’s & early ’70’s, puzzles me. Why has no young student of archaeology wanted to revisit these sites? Why has no established archaeologist published a review or an update on their status? Why has no local historian bothered to see what architectural riches still remain on local ground?

Perhaps the young archaeology students all think – It’s all been done, the tombs are stripped bare, there’s nothing left to find. And the established archaeologists all have their own niches. And the local historians are ‘à la retraite‘ and not up to beating through the bushes anymore.

Or has our general sense of Time shrunk? In an era of plenty and comfort, perhaps the last thing we want to contemplate are the evidences of former civilisations that have crumbled, and been forgotten. Ruins and our intermittent fascination with them, will be treated in a subsequent post.

But today I ‘re-found’ the last two dolmens of Mousse – with a little help from the last archaeologist who conducted a dig there in the early ’70’s – Paul Ambert. I know full well that these dolmens were never truly ‘lost’ – and that ‘les chasseurs’ could lead me to them (and probably led Ambert to them too). He still ritually castigates them, and the shepherds  ‘à qui on doit autant de pillages de dolmens’. I’m never quite sure if he is talking about local thieves currently circling like the goshawks overhead today – or those of the intervening 40 centuries that have spoilt his game. It’s a ritual complaint, and it might serve to cover a multitude of sins – some committed in the name of archaeology.

God, Juggling and Satellites

I had planned this trip with military precision:

I attacked from below, working up both sides of La Combe des Morts, eliminating likely ‘tumuli’ as I went. I would make side forays to check out other ‘hopeful’ blobs of white – and always be able to trackback if I felt I was getting lost. Believe me,  panic can set in up on these wildernesses of garrigue as the sun sets and vision gets dazzled and direction is wavering . . . In an area of 1 km by 500 m. it is possible to become frighteningly lost – without GPS.

But God decided that He did not want me to get to waypoint 6 : waypoint 6 remained fixedly at 18.1 metres distance. I shut down and started up. I changed the batteries. No – I was forever doomed to be 18.1 metres from WP6, however far I wandered. So I gave up on 6 and set the machine for 7. And you already know what I found : I was wildly adrift from Point 6 and nowhere near Point 7 – when I stumbled up to the sad remains of Mousse dolmen No. 3 :

The military precision of my planning had served for naught – this dolmen has a rudimentary tumulus alright, but it’s not visible to the Google Eye. I’d never have found it, had God not dropped a ball just at that moment.

[NB Lest you start worrying: I do not believe in divine intervention. I do however think that sometimes you can make some of your own luck. I call one, chance – the other : my good fortune].

More on all three Mousse dolmens, on the Mousse Dolmens Page – right. Just as soon as I can paste up a few words & images.

My birthday passed in a small cascade of surprises – and among them was my daughter, over from Cork, keen to go on another dolmen-hunt. This time, I assured her, things would be much more organised. I had found a short account of Paul Ambert’s digs around the hamlet of Fournes, on the ‘causses’ above Siran in the Minervois Hills. I showed her how high-tech I had got since our last shambolic wanderings : how my GPS and GoogleEarth worked so well together with waypoints entered and screen-captured printouts of likely tumuli . . . I promised there would be no crashing through the garrigue, and that we’d hit two dolmens that have not been recorded for forty years, no problem. You know where this is heading.

First hitch in Dad’s glitch-free foray: new vineyards have appeared since the GoogleSat last passed over – and someone had planted a new standing-stone:

Naturally I got inordinately excited, before she pointed out that it looked . . . too new to be prehistoric.

I reluctantly conceded that yes there was no lichen. So we headed off, stage left, in search of Ambert’s ‘dolmen de Fournes No. 1’.

An hour or so later we gave up, and were about to embark on the 100% copper-bottomed certainty of strolling up to Dolmen No. 2 – when A Man in a Tractor appeared. He saved the afternoon and he saved my skin and he led us by the hand with great humour to The Dolmen. This was the only dolmen he knew, and had known since he was small. He remembered crawling into it, and hunters scanning for game on top of its capstone. And he remembered how annoyed everyone was when the archaeologists came and stripped the tomb open. And how they demanded that some repairs were made. And how the archaeologists slapped down a bed of concrete, by way of conciliation. “Une couche pas trop archéologique!”

This, incidentally was not some local ‘abruti’, or thicko: he was a ‘Prof. de Sciences’ who had taught all over France, and had retired recently to grow vines in his native earth. He was the most amiable of men – open and good-humoured – and we completely forgot to ask if he was responsible for setting up that third megalithic monument.

So here is, at least, one of the two genuinely prehistoric stone structures at Fournes:

As a graduate of French (&Politics) she puzzled over the none-too-clear description of the two digs, and the sketch-map that Ambert added. And only thanks to our unknown guide do we now realise that both map and description are faulty.

So for a more detailed account of our visit, go to the Fournes Dolmen 2 page, to the right. Dolmen number one awaits another trip.

The dolmen de Combe Lignières (or du Ruisseau de Thais) . . . . or was it Calamiac?

This is how you find out about your village, your commune : you open your big book called Quid. It’s the Encyclopaedia Britannica of France, which had to stop printing and go online when faced with the Internets. In March 2010 it disappeared . . . no explanation, no news item, no trace. Very weird – or just very French (you know, customer relations never a strong point . . . )

Fortunately, I copied/pasted/saved exactly what Quid had researched on La Livinière :

# Dolmens de Combe-Marie, Calamiac, Combe-Violon, Combegrosse, Les Meulières, Fonsorgues, Pierre Rousse, Caussérel, Saussenac, Castel Bouqui.
# Alignement mégalithique à Saussenac.
# Habitat chalcolithique au nord-est de La Livinière.
# Traces de village néolithique à Parignoles.

When I said that information about megalithic sites is fast being lost, I didn’t for a moment imagine that France’s main repository of historical and cultural data would disappear. This was the first place to visit when I began my researches a few years ago: presumably every village, every commune had been asked for its history (culled from local knowledge, regional historians and archaeologists). If I had started looking for dolmens this spring, I would have faced a blank wall. With no Quid, there was no way I would have begun to dig deeper – because I wouldn’t have known there was a deeper in which to dig.

But as you can see from the list, there’s a lot of digging to do (for which I use my head, not a spade . . . ).

There are dolmens up there on Quid’s list that have no other existence, other than being on Quid’s list. There are no traces – online or in libraries – of any dolmen at Combegrosse, or Fonsorgues or Pierre Rousse. These places don’t even appear on the map. Somewhere I came across a whisper of a rumour of a menhir at Pierre Rousse. It’s probably a rock. And red. There’s every possibility that the fantastical jumble of stones up at Les Meulières caused some Victorian enthusiast to stake his claim to a dolmen, and ditto at Castel Bouqui – but then they are  probably one and the same heap of stones.

The dolmen at Causserel is more than likely Le Grand Dolmen de Lauriol. Nothing whatsoever has been written about Causserel, while Lauriol has been well-researched. Combegrosse does not appear anywhere on the radar, and one might think the local enthusiast responsible for this inclusion actually meant the ‘grande combe’ which is Combe Lignières. Which brings us to the dolmen of Calamiac (cited by the Captain at Megalithic Portal) – and the odd fact that the dolmen of Combe Lignières is not on the list at all . . . (Combe Lignières is close to the hamlet of Calamiac). Then there’s supposed to be both dolmen and stone-alignment at Saussenac – only there isn’t. Unless by Saussenac, they mean Combe Lignières – because they too are close.

Do you begin to see the problem? Quid used to be the Bible of All Things France – but in reality you can’t trust all of it – and yet it was the only ‘point de départ’ available. And now it’s gone. And Nobody Has Mentioned It. What is it with France and information and the internet?

Try this : ask Google for Quid – seven pages in and you’re still no nearer the biggest encyclopaedia about France and the World.

So try this : ask Google for Quid.fr – around page 5 you’ll read that it is ‘le portail de la connaissance universelle et francophone accessible à tous, avec 100% d’informations utiles et fiables’ with  ‘1000000 de visiteurs par mois (source DART)’ but by page 12 there is still no acknowlegement that Quid is temporarily dead.

So try this : ‘quid.fr disparu’ : nope nothing there either, after 5 pages. Or ‘quid.fr pas accessible’? No – that gets you nowhere either. So one million visitors per month have a) not noticed or b) not noted online, that their world encyclopaedia has disappeared.

Now try this : ask Google for ‘dolmens’. Just type those 6 letters in, and what do you get? Result No 1 is Wikipedia, naturally –  and then rather surprisingly, at No 3 – this site. More surprising yet  is that if you switch to Images, there on page 1 you get our daughter Jessica, at a dolmen, on this site.

Dolmens and girls – it seems you internautes have made your choices, for whatever reasons.

Never mind that the world is going to hell in a motorised golf-cart, never mind that the next volcano will trigger the collapse of tourism and take our livelihood down with it – this May day was insanely munificent : it kept delivering surprises and delights that went way past what I asked for.

This is the day that was in it : hot sun and breezes, grassy gullies and massive rock-shelters,  micro-vineyards interplanted with young olives, ancient cherry-trees and antique wells, wierd rock-formations and a rare stone-alignment . . . and a long-lost dolmen.

The walk up the combe was lush with grasses, wild asparagus and fennel – but the path led upward onto the hot stoney causse.

But up among the hot vines was a cool slot : limpid water gulped down, flavored with wild aniseed.

It’s a complex photo, but a simple scene : one ancient ‘guine’ or sour cherry; one stone shed with an old Peugeot, and one extraordinary stone chamber above. On the bed of the truck was a note : ‘VENEZ BOIRE une verre à la maison au-dessus. Pascal.’ An invitation to a friend, or to the world?

Stumbling around on the top of this little ‘causse’, I found this row of stones. Three are visible and another 6 disappear into the scrub : all in a clear 15 metre line running south-east: towards the winter solstice. At first I thought this was ‘the dolmen’, and was mightily disappointed – it looked all wrong. [More on the cromlech/stone alignment of Saussenac in the next post & Page].

But I have done my homework : I have identified other likely ‘white blobs’ on Google Earth, and I have Paul Ambert’s generalised description from the  ’70’s and so it’s on up into the sea of  prickly ilex. And after an hour of thorns and trees and scrub, a stoney ‘island’ appears, with that heart-jolting, breath-seizing glimpse of a white slab jutting above the garrigue : it’s there! It does exist!

It’s huge and it’s magnificent – and it’s a complete wreck.

The photos that follow, on the Combe Lignières Dolmen Page, will show what a mess time and peasants and archaeologists have made of the place. This is the Last Stone Standing. As usual, it’s the primary, eastern orthostat – almost always the deepest set and the biggest. Yet this recurrence is never mentioned by any of the experts who have visited all these dolmens of ours, over the past century. Do they not see these as buildings, as architecture? Do they only see them as ‘boxes’ that hold the objects they are so desirous of?

The expertise of archaeologists is not in doubt here – but the narrowness of focus has I fear, led to a failure of imagination. The subject of Ruins is going to be a recurrent theme in subsequent posts.

The day didn’t end there :

This old fellow was in clover – he thinks Combe Lignières is heaven.

We live under the slumbering bulk of Alaric, and forget how large it looms to others.

When architecture and landscape mean so much to ordinary people, I wonder at their exclusion by archaeologists : Ambert’s insistence that the Combe Lignière dolmen is oriented to the north – when this view is so present to the south.

The dolmen hunter’s reward :

Armed with Paul Ambert’s 1970 detailed description of the dolmen de Combe Violon  plus a printout of the area from Google Earth, I was fairly confident of finding this ‘ épave ‘ as he called it – a wreck. But after several hours of wading through waist-high box and spiny broom, kerm oak and rosemary, I gave up and drove on down the track.

Which brought me to a dead-end, and face-to-face with Danielle Durand, in her vines.

She is smiling here – but initially was rather suspicious of my motives. Cross-questioned, the car inspected for metal-detector and personal details written down – I was passed as genuine. Now we could relax and talk dolmens – about which she knows a great deal. We quickly took to eachother – and what a warm-hearted person she revealed : passionate and engaged in every aspect of her environment.

She generously took time from her painstaking work (de-budding each vine so as to reduce the quantity and thereby raise the quality of their wine) and showed me ‘her dolmen’. I would never have found it, tucked between the two ridges that flank their beautifully sinuously planted parcelle.

Danielle and Paul Durand bought the land some years ago, from an elderly vigneronne, who told them about the dolmen – but whose memory of its location was vague. Danielle herself spent much time looking for it, and it was two years later that she fell into it while beating through the bushes. They have now cleared the trees from around it, and opened a path.

This energetic couple have worked hard to transform their land into a work of art – and are reaping their reward : Domaine Paul Louis Eugene commands good prices and exports around the world. Mary and I will be back to paint and explore this hidden corner of les Causses above Siran.

Here is her dolmen :-

There’s more info and photos on the Combe Violon dolmen Page.

Time to take a break from les Lacs – the density of tombs and the ‘heavy traffic’ of amateur and academic diggers becomes wearisome after a while.

There are other, more solitary prehistoric tombs dotted along the limestone karsts of the Minervois. But they exist in a kind of limbo: a half-life that continues in reference-sources such as the records of communes, on Quid.fr, in Wikipédia, and in the Megalithic Portal where ‘the Captain’ has assiduously done his homework in citing all known reports. They really do deserve the name of  ‘France’s Most Forgotten Dolmens’.

There’s a string of them, between the almost-necropolis of la Matte and the real necropolis of Bois-Bas, and the semi-necropolis of les Lacs : Les Dolmens de Combe Lignières, de Combe Violon, du Vallat de Vignes, de Combe Marie . . . and then others, even more ignored – de La Foret, de Mousse, de Fournes, de Castel Bouqui . . .

Here’s the very small, very strange little Coffre du Combe Marie:

It’s not very impressive, with headstone cracked and fallen forward.

Why contemporary archaeologists no longer take interest in locating these dolmens, is no great mystery – they’re no longer sexy and there’s no money available. Or – the book’s been written : the archaeologists of the ’70’s have been in, and have trashed the site forevermore (see some future post : Archaeology is Destructive) – so what’s the point?

As long as prehistory, and archaeology, and dolmens are seen as the sole preserves of archaeologists – who, having visited, move on with little concern about how others view the distant past (other than a strictly scholastic view, as opposed to an Everyman’s Right to view the past) – then large chunks of humanity’s impact on the earth will go unobserved/unvisited/undiscussed.

Peak-Wood happened to prehistoric communities. Peak-Tin, and Peak-Copper altered the trade and development of proto-societies. Peak-oil is about to change the direction of our ‘modern society’ in unimaginable ways. The wilful closetting of information, into various ‘expertises’ that are impermeable to other areas of knowledge – looks close to criminal. Looks deliberate. Looks like ‘they’ want ‘us’ to remain ignorant. Of course, more prosaically, they don’t want ‘the general public’  trampling over ‘their’ territory.

Sometimes you wonder – who do archaeologists hate most? Greedy landowners who ransacked dolmens to add to their collections? Early ‘gentlemen-scientists’ who covetted a few bronze daggers? Ignorant landowners who used the stones to cap their wells? Shepherds who rebuilt the ruins to make a shelter? Stricken peasants looking for a bit of gold? Previous archaeologists blundering about? Tourists trampling the precious evidence? Sad detectors with a spade?

Our modern-day prehistorian is a poor paranoid creature: 140 generations of unscientific people have been busy, messing up his dig. Fortunately, France is good at making Laws. And there is a law against all this. Any mediaeval person desecrating a tomb will be punished. Unfortunately, anyone nowadays with a metal-detector will go unpunished.

Small tomb – ok. But the big history? The big history lies in the 880 teeth that were found by Paul Ambert, during his meticulous search in 1971. And that there is evidence of early Bronze Age incineration.

For more on this, see Le Coffre du Combe Marie page, to the right – under Dolmens.

I now have photocopies of Jacques Lauriol & Jean Guilaine’s 1964/65 dig, and some time to compare their diagrams with Paul Ambert’s. It’s worth noting that in the five years combined, only three photos can be accessed – and only then with some difficulty. And that Lauriol had to rely on a M. Gibert of Lauragel for the photo of dolmen no. 2 (Lauriol’s numbering, which jumps around without reference to any north-to-south progression.)

What kind of science were they all practicing, if photography was so absent? What was their idea of a record of events, of architecture? ( To be accurate, Auriol or was it Guilaine, does actually mention the word ‘architecture’ – it’s a rare occurence. It might be why Jean Guilaine has become one of France’s foremost writers on the prehistoric world of southern Europe – he seems to have a wider perspective over the entire prehistoric period in France . He’s also written one of the very few ‘prehistoric novels’ : ‘ Pourquoi j’ai construit une maison carrée‘. EPONA, Paris (1994)

The situation up there on the Causse seems to get more confused with every team that visits. Both of these teams – the last serious excavations, now 40 years ago –  refer to all the many previous researchers in a generalised and dismissive way. And of course they never fail to take a swipe at ‘les fouilleurs clandestins’ , as if 4000 years of labour and occupation ( which is 120 generations of shepherds and farmers and hunters and plain simple poor folk ) wouldn’t have had some effect on the tombs . . .

But there seems to be little readiness to establish any sensible order in the numbering or location of the dolmens. There seems to be little serious acknowledgement of previous work – let alone a concerted effort towards building a picture of the prehistoric life that would be accessible to the general public. The overall impression I get is that of a closed group of researchers in competition with themselves. The blanket laissez-passer is ‘Le Patrimoine’ – they are doing it for the common good, for the history of us all. And beneath this shroud all manner of confusion and misinformation is allowed to proliferate.

While trying to locate the last three dolmens of Les Lacs, I came upon this structure.

In my eagerness to locate dolmen number 4, I thought it was this. But now that I’ve had time to look at my photocopies of Lauriol & Guilaine’s drawings and diagrams, I realise it’s something else entirely. In the heat of the moment I convinced myself that it shared similaties with a very ‘old’ and ‘early’ little circular dolmenitic tomb that I had visited up on Serre Pascale.

Now I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m confused. The dolmen 1 of Serre Pascale is tiny, and has ‘hallmark’ stones of varied colour. What I found was too wide to bear a capstone. So was that a neolithic ‘cabane’ that some archaeologist has cleared, or an elaborate hoax? It seems half-set in a tumulus of 8 metres, like a dolmen, but I can find no reference to it anywhere. Which means that I now have to go back up there to find Lauriol & Guilaine’s dolmen No. 4.

There are more photos of this ‘building’ on the Unknown Structure of les Lacs page.

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The dolmens of les Lacs is turning out to be a much more complicated subject than I ever imagined. A more detailed explication with diagrams, (and poorly reproduced photos of the time) of the conflicting reports is to be found on the permanent Pages, to the right, under Lacs dolmens diagrams.

The situation on the next hillside to the west – Le Bouys – with five contested dolmens, is not going to be any easier to sort out. The situation at Bois-Bas, to the west again, is likely to be hellish: it’s a necropolis of 12 to 16 tombs . . .

I have a problem with the archaeology of archaeology. I keep unearthing new bits of old information, and that should make finding lost dolmens easier, but it doesn’t – it just adds another layer of complexity or uncertainty. Recently I found a short report of Paul Ambert’s 1969-72 digs at Les Lacs, with a drawing of a dolmen he describes as having ‘échappé aux recherches des nombreux archéologues qui, de Renouvier à J. Lauriol se sont intéressés à la préhistoire des Causses de Minerve’. [Gallia préhistoire  1974  Volume 17  Numéro   17-2  pp. 629-664 ]. My problem was not just locating it, but identifying a dolmen not written about for 40 years: is it Dolmen des Lacs 4, or 6?

Well – I found this dolmen on my second attempt, after a lot of crashing about in the garrigue. But at first inspection, it didn’t look like the drawing – and it was the fourth dolmen as you go south. So for a while this was for me, ‘Dolmen 4 des Lacs’ – until more information was unearthed.

This is my dolmen des Lacs 4 (Ambert’s dolmen 6) – taken from the foot, or entrance.

There were enough discrepancies between his plan and my photo (and experience of visit) to make me do the whole trip again – another entire afternoon – to verify that we were talking about the same dolmen.

My two major problems centred on the two fundamentals of dolmen-construction : the orthostats and the orientation. Ambert’s drawing shows the three side stones to the left (west) and two to the right (east). His drawing shows them upright, vertical. My photo shows two stones leaning outwards and one fallen in, against the east orthostat. They are all virtually uprooted, with little to hold them at their bases.

What has happened here?

The second problem was orientation. Ambert states that this dolmen was oriented towards East North-East, at 60°. Whereas I read it as the complete opposite : 250° West South-West.

What on earth is going on here?

For more photos, and further elucidation about the Dolmen des Lacs 6 and its neighbouring tombs : go to the Dolmens des Lacs parent Page. Dolmens 4 and 5 will appear shortly.

IMPORTANT NOTE : In the light of my surprise discovery today in the library of S.E.S.A. (la Société des Etudes Scientifiques de l’Aude) of a detailed and thorough report by Jean Guilaine on his research of Les dolmens des Lacs (Cahiers Ligures de Préhistoire et d’Archéologie. 1964) –  I have the choice of hurriedly re-writing half this post – or eating my words, and my hat, and a large slice of humble pie. I choose the latter. Continue reading and see how wrong I got it. Guilaine is one of our local heroes – not only friendly and helpful, but a thoroughgoingly good archaeologist. His report includes both photos and map coordinates (although they refer to a system no longer in use on any currently available map). I just wish I’d found it earlier.

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For 180 years the realm of Letters and Science in France has known about the dolmens des Lacs, when  ‘Renouvrier les mentionnait en 1831′ [ is that Charles Renouvier, the French philosopher – writing at the age of 16 ? – or his brother Jules, or his father a député of Montpellier ? It doesn’t  really matter – except these meagre references are all we have left to work with. And I do try to track them down. NB  This dating, so often reproduced in print and online is also inaccurate: it should be 1841 – making Renouvier 26 years old. ]  Since then nine other experts, either amateur or professional, have studied or excavated them: Paul Louis Cazalis de Fondouce in 1879 noted six dolmens, and in 1931 Jean Miquel de Barroubio located ten between Le Bouys and Les Lacs. Théophile and son Philippe  Héléna (conservateur de la Musée de Narbonne) placed their various finds in the museum, but failed to note what tomb they came from. Since WWII there has been le docteur Arnal (much revered, he always seems to be referred to thus) followed by Jacques Lauriol and Jean Guilaine (1964/5), with a certain M. Audibert and an equally unknown J. Hinault, until finally Lambert added his report. This was the last dig, led by Paul Ambert and took place from 1969 to 1972.

Two of the six have been ‘restored’ and marked on the map, for the benefit of the public. The other four have been allowed to disappear from sight, and practically from memory. I have been trying off and on over the last few years, to put them back on the map. But it’s only in the last few months that I have begun to ask : why have they been forgotten ? and why is it so hard to find them ?

The many hours spent online and reading through library archives has produced few results – a scattering of paragraphs in the records of the ‘Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française’ and in Gallia Préhistoire. All I could find of Ambert’s three-year-long dig was a few pages of finds, plus some drawings.

What has become of all the work that these learned men devoted to the six dolmens? I could find no photos, no maps and no coordinates. These were men of means: some were wealthy gentlemen-scientists, others were publicly-funded professional academics. They must have come equipped with cameras and possibly theodolites – and the full records must be somewhere : in private collections? in university archives? Wherever they are – it’s far from the eyes of the uneducated and untrustworthy public.

Some time back I looked up the word ‘archaeology’, and concerning the method of archaeology, Wikipedia puts the situation thus: ‘The data collected from the excavation is studied and evaluated in an attempt to achieve the original research objectives of the archaeologists. It is then considered good practice for the information to be published so that it is available to other archaeologists and historians, although this is sometimes neglected.’ (my italics).

The article continues : ‘Archaeologists are also very much reliant on public support, and the question of exactly who they are doing their work for is often discussed.’ Amongst themselves, I wonder? Or by others outside the charmed circle?

What archaeology is for, and who it is for, are weighty questions. The debate has continued for decades – though more in the English-speaking nations than the closed Francophone enclave. There seems to be a wider world of discussion and reflexion about the role of archaeology that the French ( because of a language deficit, or a cultural repression) seem unwilling to enter. My observations are based on repeated searches over a number of years: online, the material presented by French archaeologists is dull. It may be correct and scientifically accurate, worthy and serious – but it’s dull. Half of it seems aimed at school children, and the rest is academic. Personal writing, in the form of blogs or websites is extremely rare. The element of reflexivity – that readiness to examine one’s actions and motives – which the French appear eminently disposed towards in other areas of life, seems stifled here.

Discussion about our past has moved on from the science-based model that pertained in the 1960’s and ’70’s – termed processual archaeology, or ‘the New Archaeology’. It’s understandable that a young academic discipline would want to look ‘grown-up’, and want to take its place in the ranks of more senior disciplines. It’s understandable that it would look to the Sciences, and ally itself with areas that offered the weight of precise measurability (carbon-dating etc). The need to move away from the vague generalities of the pre-war ‘gentlemen-scientists’ is reasonable and desirable. That this necessitated a move into inaccessible expertise is however, deplorable.

And so this is where Post-Processual archaeology stepped in – at least in The U.K. and the U.S.A. Its critics deride it as un-scientific, but that is precisely its point. It asks archaeologists to reflect upon who they are, and what questions they ask of the past, and how they ask those questions. Everything about a dig is open to questioning – every assumption, every method, every prior stance. The point of the dig is also questioned: who is it for? who will see the results? How will the dig affect the local community? Who owns the results of the dig? Who stands to gain or lose? Whose culture is being revealed by the dig – that of the searched-for Past, or those of the lived-in Present?

The idea that experts from elsewhere could come to a place and dig it up, and go away – and not account fully for their actions, their finds and their conclusions, is utterly anathema to the post-processual archaeologist. Boxing up a few items for show in a local museum, adds insult to injury. Burying the map and hiding the locations in the vaults adds arrogance to superciliousness.

[I should note here that Jean Guilaine, as a rising star in French prehistory, went to great lengths to secure the agreement and cooperation of landowners and community leaders – with a specific commitment that all artifacts found on-site would not leave the area.]

But if you’d like to read one man’s journey from the old ways of archaeology to the new, then I can only recommend Laurent Olivier’s work called ‘Des Vestiges‘. Beware: it’s a 6.5 Mo PDF file and it’s 285 pages of French. There’s a passage (around pages 51-59) that reveal in fascinating personal detail, the differences in approach, attitude, aim, mentality and methodology between a team of French and German archaeologists working on a cross-border dig. They learn in the process how each side’s strengths and weaknesses can be harnessed together, to achieve something each team alone could not.

Olivier’s writing is part thesis, part memoir: a good example (incorporating paintings and photos and literature) of what ‘working towards the past’ might be. It’s rich, human, complex and open-ended.

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You’re tired of theory, and you’d like some photos of dolmens? I feel the same. Yesterday I found the last two elusive dolmens des Lacs, and the next post will be all photos and no talk.