LEUHAN, France: A piece of rock with mysterious markings that lay largely unstudied for 4,000 years is now being hailed as a treasure map for archaeologists who are using it to hunt for ancient sites around north-western France.
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Excavated in 1900 by Paul du Chatellier in a barrow and forgotten for a century, this ornamented slab was recently rediscovered in the Musée dArchéologie nationale (MAN Museum of National Archaeology) and was the subject of a significant study that allowed it to be interpreted as the oldest cartographical representation of a known territory in Europe, a probable marker of the political power of a principality of the early Bronze Age.
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(AFP)
.- A Bronze-age slab first uncovered in 1900 in western France is the oldest map in Europe, according to a study released this week. The 4,000-year-old object, known as the Saint-Belec slab, is engraved with markings that represent part of the Black Mountains region of western France, said Yvan Pailler, an archaeologist and one of the authors of the study published in the Bulletin of the French Prehistoric Society. Today, it is the oldest map of a territory in Europe, he said. You can see