Gallo-Roman remains of the archaeological site of Alesia, Burgundy, France • ISTOCKPHOTO At the end of the fall of 1860, workers working on the drainage of fields located at the foot of Mont Auxois, near the village of Alise-Sainte-Reine, came across an arsenal of weapons and bronze axes. . When this news spread, connoisseurs thought that these remains came from a seminal episode in French history:the Battle of Alesia, where the legions of Julius Caesar defeated the Gallic troops of Vercingetorix in 52 BC. AD Patriotic digs The weapons in question actually dated from the previous millennium, but that detail hardly mattered. At that time, France had a great interest in its Gallo-Roman past. In 1857, Napoleon III had indeed established the Commission de topographie des Gaules with the intention of drawing up maps and archaeological dictionaries on which to base the writing of his monumental Histoire de Jules César (1865-1866). It is precisely this commission which took in hand the excavations of Alise, launched on April 20, 1861. Its president, the engineer Félix Caignart de Saulcy, was charged with planning the research and its secretary, Alexandre Bertrand (an archaeologist trained in the French School of Athens), to follow them closely. Barely a few weeks after work began, Napoleon III visited the site. He walked around the entire enclosure, where he found a sword that had remained buried there, then had the vicissitudes of the siege of Julius Caesar reconstructed from one of the ends of Mont Auxois. It was there that he had a colossal statue of Vercingetorix erected in August 1865, a work by Aimé Millet that can still be admired today. Also read: Vercingetorix against Clovis:the Gauls facing the national past Napoleon III showed such interest in Alésia that in 1862 he placed a personal delegate (Colonel of Artillery Eugène Stoffel) in charge of the excavations, which were thus carried out with military efficiency until 1865. The field work was entrusted to Paul Millot, cantonal road inspector, and Victor Pernet, local landowner. The first administered the works, paid the workers and communicated the results, while the second managed the teams. If the workforce of the latter was generally limited to 12 workers, it could sometimes reach 60 workers working between 10 and 12 hours a day for a salary of 2 francs. "The closer we got to the camp, the more finds we made" Excavations soon brought to light the siege works made by Caesar's legions:two lines of concentric trenches built around Alesia, one intended to block any attempt by the besieged populations to leave, the other oriented towards the outside to protect the legions from a possible attack by the Gallic army sent to help Vercingetorix. Many objects were found in the trenches, as noted by the assistant commander of the gendarmerie of Semur-en-Auxois:"In the excavations currently being carried out on the territory of Alise, we have just discovered in the circumvallation ditch various arms and a silver cup with handles that can hold half a litre. The cup was immediately taken to the Emperor, who was then in Biarritz, to reserve for him the pleasure of cleaning it with his own hands. The exact site where the Gallic reinforcements tried to break the Roman lines was also located, as described by Victor Pernet in his memoirs:“The closer we approached the camp, the more finds we made. They were human bones […] and also a considerable amount of horse bones. The entrenchments were strewn with objects of harness, weapons, armor, helmets, breastplates, spears, swords, javelins, etc. not to mention many Roman and Gallic coins. » A contested place These discoveries occurred against the background of a second battle, an academic dispute over the exact location of the Gallic city besieged by Julius Caesar, which raged for almost a century. If tradition had already admitted that it was indeed Alise-Sainte-Reine, the reading of the Gallic War de César nevertheless prompted several specialists to suggest other candidate cities:Izernore (Ain), Novalaise (Savoie), Aluze (Saône-et-Loire). In 1855, an architect by the name of Alphonse Delacroix submitted a new locality for consideration by an academy of Franche-Comté scholars:Alaise, a village in the Doubs region 25 km from Besançon, where the "trenches of Caesar" would have been brought to light in 1861 thanks to archaeological explorations. The new excavations carried out between 1952 and 1954 with all the rigor of modern archeology, however, provided indisputable results:only the remains of a medieval occupation were found at Alaise, and the "trenches of Caesar" were only simple natural accidents specific to the limestone terrain of the region. At present, all historians agree that Alésia corresponds to the site of Mont Auxois, even if the controversy continues to unleash passions locally. Timeline 1861 Excavations are launched in the plain at the foot of the hill of Alise-Sainte-Reine.1861 Scholars put forward the theory, discarded today, of a location in Alaise, in Franche-Comté.1861-1865 Archaeologists found numerous remains of Caesar's camp at Alise-Sainte-Reine.1991-1997 New excavations at Alise-Sainte-Reine confirm that this is indeed the place of the battle cited by Caesar. Between the lines of the Gallic War Archaeologists who took part in the excavations at Alésia between 1861 and 1865 (including Félix Caignart) focused their research on the Gallic War of Julius Caesar, where we can read that "the oppidum of Alesia was located at the top of a hill, at a very high point. At the foot of this mountain flowed two streams, from two different sides. Before the city lay a plain about 3,000 paces in length. A method that gave rise to some errors, but made it possible to identify almost all of the topography of the site.
