2024-09-23 16:00:09
When we think of Vercingetorix, the great Gallic and Arvernian people, the name “Gergovie”, associated with the famous victorious battle against Julius Caesar and his legions (in 52 BC), bursts into our brain . Turn it off with the back of a neuron and instead remember that of “Corent” (Puy-de-Dôme), a 70-hectare volcanic plateau located very close to Gergovie, because this is where the capital of the Arvernes is once stopped , as shown by the archaeological investigations of Matthieu Poux from the beginning of the century.
In an interview he gave Monde in April, this professor of Roman and Gallo-Roman archeology at the Lumière-Lyon-II University announced that he has submitted a new excavation project with the aim of “put your finger on the money workshop” of Corent, which, he adds, “will be first”. Double for Matthieu Poux: we accept his project, and the recently completed search has made it possible to discover where the Gauls of Corent received money.
Thanks to the military campaigns that have already been carried out on the Plateau, especially on the 6 hectares of the center of the Gallic city, the scientist has a good idea where this workshop could be hidden. The summer efforts are therefore focused on a small space in what was, more than two thousand years ago, an artistic area, to the east of the main square of Corent. A whole cluster of clues converge on this plot. “In 2010, a hole from a neighboring house revealed this thing…” And Matthieu Poux took out a strange object from a plastic bag, three small bronze ovals connected by a thin rod. “These are empty money”, it is specific.
There is no culinary reference in this name “flan”, which in numismatics (the study of coins and medals) shapes a metal circle before turning it into a coin. As the string of three hollows shows, these are thrown onto an assembly line “into small pellets divided with scissor, described archaeologist. Then a hollow is placed between the two coins, metal coins where the instructions to be marked on the money were engraved in the hollow. The best wind on everything and the money has the wall and its change. The scene generally shows the image of the king and alternates the motif – a wild boar, a lyre or, for Vercingetorix, a horse and a Roman amphora.
A piece of stone
In 2010, in addition to these pellets, small metal scissors were discovered to cut them as well as baskets. Another foundation, another ugly place, as well as a hammered corner, “damaged beyond repair”. Even further, the brand of money: “This is why I want to persist in this areaMatthieu Poux explains, go to the heart of this area. » In this case, a patch is not made of land but rather of rock, because in this place the table volcano is exposed. If the curtains are hidden there, to discover them, it is necessary to check the ground in the rocks and even the cavities of anthropogenic origin: the towers of the lost houses, the pits, old wells.
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