Advanced bastion of the Morvan massif, Mount Beuvray looks to the city of Autun which extends into the plain about 20 km from there, in the heart of Burgundy. Between the hills worn by the weather, displaying their beautiful rounded curves, and deep valleys, Beuvray reveals its venerable forest. And under the forest, the remains of Bibracte, the first capital of Educens, are gradually to our knowledge. It was this exceptional archeological interest in the places that took them from oblivion. Now equipped with a research center and a European museum of ambition, the site is the driving force behind a sustainable development project that strives to combine landscape management with the involvement of the inhabitants. Since 2008, he has benefited from the Grand Site label of France. Enchanting and intimate, Beuvray invites the discovery of a fragile nature that man has constantly reshaped for millennia in the midst of the vicissitudes of history.
Under the forest, a city abandoned for two millennia
The landscape of Mount Beuvray reveals its green curves on the territory of Haut-Morvan, a mountain not so high as it actually is, because it grows at only 901 m in the Haut-Folin, less than ten kilometers away, but at an altitude still sufficient for the winters to be rigorous and snowy. Along the roads that splash between fudges and boatyards, the discreet silhouette of the mountain appears only furtively and is only recognized by the old ones. It is at its summit that the measure of the singularity of the site is measured: It is a gazebo opening on the surrounding plains. The succession of groves and boulders with, from here, a hamlet or pond, without anything that pollutes the sight, seems to be an immutable landscape. Inevitably, there is a particular attachment in these places.
To quote Pierre-Louis Faloci, the architect who designed the Bibracte Museum, this particular atmosphere is explained by the "deaf history" of the place: its long and prestigious history has left discreet but immanent traces in the landscape, which archeological exploration reveals gradually. For, before being covered by a forest, Mount Beuvray was the site of an ephemeral city but of great radiation, a little over two thousand years ago. If you are given the chance to climb Beuvray in clear time, you will immediately understand why Gauls choose this place: the feeling of dominating the surrounding territories is particularly acute; The eyes are lost beyond the hills, meadows and bogs to reach the volcanoes of Auvergne and to the snow-covered summits of Mont Blanc. The capital of the people educated where Vercingétorix was confirmed at the head of the Gauloise coalition in 52 before our era and where Julius Caesar was able to draw up his famous De Bello Gallico, Bibracte is a place of memory par excellence, the place of the oldest episodes that can be attached to the history of France.
Excavations from the nineteenth century
And yet the memory of its location had been lost until an eminent autunois scholar Jacques-Gabriel Bulliot (1817-1902) made it clear that Bibracte was of course on Beuvray. Bibract knew his first excavations in 1864 under the impulse of Napoleon III, who had just launched a great archeological survey on the places where Caesar had shown himself militarily. The Emperor therefore searched Gergovie and Alésia, but only subsidized Bulliot who, in thirty years of diligent research, revealed the material reality of the Gauls of the era of the Gauls War: objects of daily life, architecture, the urban setting becoming oppidum - this Latin word of oppidum is borrowed from Caesar which constantly uses it to designate the main agglomerations of Gauls.
In Bulliot succeeded for a few brief excavations campaigns between 1897 and 1901, his nephew Joseph Déchelette (1862-1914). These years were decisive, not by the scale of the new discoveries, but by the publicity which the textile industry, Waselette, made them, but especially great scientist: its monumental archeology textbook in several tombs between 1908 and 1914, the year of its death in war, is the first synthesis devoted to European prehistory. Its author shows that Bibracte is a point of emergence of a large-scale urban phenomenon that preceded the Romanization of Gaul. After the premature death of Waselette, the site fell into oblivion for many decades, before the research resumed with means growing in the 1980 s. The work of Bulliot and Ravelette is then pursued and greatly exceeded. It is a constantly changing urban body that reveals itself under the trowel of the new generation of archeologists, far more careful than the excavations and pioches of the nineteenth century terrassies, recruited in the villages around.
New discoveries
It turns out that Bibract is founded at the very end of the century before our age. The rampart line that expresses this foundation, which is not less than seven kilometers away, is quickly reduced to five kilometers. It's a constant fact on the site that new constructions are downstairs and rebuilt every twenty or twenty-five years. Over the course of these reconstructions, the brand of Rome is increasingly asserting itself. Initially limited to movable objects (especially the countless amphora fragments), it invests brutally in the field of architecture in the aftermath of the Gaules War with the construction of a monumental ensemble of nearly 100 m away that incorporates a forum. To the next generation, it is the turn of the local elite to build large houses on the Roman model. The city continues to grow until the 1920 s before our era, with a population that certainly counts in thousands of inhabitants: maybe 5,000, maybe 10,000. It certainly fulfills the role of the people of education, whose territory is deployed between Saône and the Allier, a strategic situation that enables it to control the main communication routes between the Mediterranean and the plains of northwestern Europe.
Educated by Rome, the Educens display, as the Bibracte excavations show, a particular will to join the imperial project. Paradoxically, this will soon result in the decadence of Bibracte: a new site is chosen where the capital is moved, at the crossroads of important roads and in a plain that allows to deploy a vast project of urban planning to the Roman. This city will bear the name of Augustodunum, which became Autun. The early abandonment of Bibract has at least made archeologists happy. The ruins of the city were very quickly buried. The maintenance of a modest temple on Mount in Roman times, later transformed into a chapel, then the introduction of fairs in the thirteenth century, finally the presence of a Franciscan monastery for a few centuries, had little impact on the remains of the Ier century before our era. It is enough today to lift the foam and the dead leaves to go back two thousand years in our history. This city, which lived only a century ago, has been occupying archeologists for a century and a half, and there is a great deal to bet that they will pursue their research for as long as they are allowed, so the matter is rich!
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When is it? As soon as the beautiful days to enjoy the mountain, all year round to visit the site.
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