New excavations to decipher the Saint-Bélec slab, the oldest map in Europe

How to decipher the Saint-Bélec slab? Archaeologists have launched new excavations in Finistère to try to unravel the secret of this block of schist, engraved 4,000 years ago, considered to be the oldest map of a territory in Europe.

“We are trying to better contextualize the discovery, to have dating elements and to check if any fragments remain,” explains archaeologist Yvan Pailler, professor at the University of Western Brittany (UBO), on the site of excavations of the Saint-Bélec tumulus, in Leuhan (Finistère), in the Breton Black Mountains. It was while excavating this tomb that Paul du Chatellier (1833-1911) discovered the slab engraved in 1900, before it fell into oblivion for more than a century. “Let us not let ourselves be led astray by fantasy, leaving it to a Champollion, who will perhaps be found one day, to give us the reading,” the archaeologist then wrote, in reference to Jean-François Champollion, known for deciphering hieroglyphics.

Yvan Pailler and Clément Nicolas (CNRS researcher) have already partly carried out this decryption work since they found the slab, in 2014, in a cellar of the National Archeology Museum (MAN) in Saint-Germain. -en-Laye (Yvelines). From the start, “there were a few engraved symbols that made sense straight away”, such as the Odet valley, a coastal river, remembers Mr. Pailler. To confirm their initial intuition, the two researchers had a 3D scan carried out of this block measuring 2.20 m by 1.53 m, to compare it to current maps using a statistical method. The similarity of the slab with the current topography reaches 80%.

“We identified the hydrographic network, the relief of the black mountains,” explains Clément Nicolas. “We still have to identify all the symbols of geometric shape, the legend that goes with them, the roads…”, he continues. The most mysterious symbols are these numerous small cupules, circular hollows of 1 to 10 mm in diameter with which the slab is pierced, which could represent mounds, dwellings or even geological deposits. We will have to “survey the territory” to “identify the sites which are shown on the map”, underlines Mr. Clément. A job that will “take us a good fifteen years,” he says.

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“Starting from the map to try to find archaeological sites is a great approach. We never work like that,” smiles Mr. Pailler. “It’s a treasure map.” Undertaken from aerial views or on foot, this step will provide definitive proof of the topographical character of the engravings. But also to date the map more precisely. “It is the dating of these sites which will give us a range for the dating of the engravings,” underlines Mr. Nicolas. During the project carried out this fall, excavators discovered a flint arrowhead in the Saint-Bélec tumulus, “one of the largest Bronze Age tombs in Brittany”, according to Mr. Pailler.

They also dug out five new engraved fragments from the slab, which had been broken before being reused as the wall of a tomb. This reuse could be the sign of a change of power at the end of the Early Bronze Age, in Brittany. Land registry and sign of authority over a territory, the engraved slab would represent a territory 30 km long and 21 km wide and would be contemporary with these princes of Armorica, reigning over “small, very centralized kingdoms without writing”, according to M .Nicolas. These “all-powerful elites” were “perhaps overthrown” and “the engraved map no longer had any meaning and was doomed by being broken to serve as building material,” he suggests.