The case was revealed by the "Sites & Monuments" association and made the front page of many newspapers and TV channels: work was carried out on a site in Carnac without following the INRAP instructions for archaeological excavations. Megaliths were uprooted and crushed in a field where a Monsieur Bricolage shop had been built. The store had been granted planning permission by the town’s mayor.
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- The shop under construction on an unexcavated megalithic site
Photo: Sites & Monuments - See the image in its page
We will say no more about this scandal, other than to point to the association’s very well-documented articles. Theoretically, this is outside our field - we do not deal with pre-medieval archaeology. But we could have made an exception, given the extent of the damage to a site proposed for Unesco World Heritage status, as we did in the past for the massacre of the amphitheatre at Fréjus (see articles) or that of the Temple of Mercury in Auvergne (see article). Because these are important heritage issues.
But to do that, we need to be able to carry out our own investigations to verify the claims made by various parties - the DRAC [1] has issued a very unconvincing press release and the mayor believes that he is not responsible. As you can read in these articles, there have been many attacks on the Carnac site. Clearly, the heritage of Carnac is not only threatened by this affair. But we simply don’t have the time, as is the case with many of the dossiers sent to us by readers almost every day, given the sheer number of threats. We can only deal with a few of them.
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