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In November 1897, in a field near the village of Coligny in eastern France, a local inhabitant unearthed two strange objects. One was an imposing statue of Mars, the Roman god of war. The other was an ancient bronze tablet, 5 feet wide and 3.5 feet high. It bore numerals in Roman but the words were in Gaulish, the extinct version of Celtic spoken by the inhabitants of France before the Roman conquest in the first century B.C. The tablet, now known as the Coligny calendar, turned out to record the Celtic system of measuring time, as well as being...

Is there more than a whiff of truth about Gallic charm? By Kim Willsher in Paris (Filed: 09/10/2005) It is one of the most enduring and insulting of national stereotypes: the Frenchman as a workshy character whose unpleasant body odours owe as much to his aversion to soap as to his love of garlic and onions. The French dismiss such talk as no more than cruel caricature, dreamt up by their beer-swilling, overweight and perfidious English neighbours. Now a leading French journal has produced figures suggesting that it may be closer to the truth than anyone – except perhaps rush-hour...

BORDEAUX, France (AFP) - French archaeologists said this week they had discovered an exceptional Gallic war treasure in the south of the country, including rare war trumpets and ornate helmets. The some 470 objects, or fragments of objects, were found at the end of September during a dig at Naves, in the department of Correze in southern France, in a ditch hollowed out of a Gallic-Roman temple, they said. "The exceptional character of this discovery lies mainly in the presence of five almost complete carnyx," Christophe Maniquet, an archeologist at Inrap, France's national institute for Archeological studies, said. "They are...