Archaeologists Stumbled Upon a Message in a Bottle—from 200 Years Ago
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Archaeologists digging through a French cliffside located a 200-year-old message in a bottle.
Amidst much speculation, the team opened it to find a message from another archaeologist digging at the site—200 years ago.
The archaeologist was the first to explore the ancient location, and was notable in the area for his work.
The idea of a message in a bottle that you might toss out to sea or bury in the earth is an inherently romantic one—a bid for connection with a far-off friend, whether that “far-off” be physical or temporal. A group of students recently experienced the latter, and connected with a 200-year-old predecessor via a recent discovery in France.
The message and its vessel were discovered atop cliffs at an old Gaulish village near the port of Dieppe as a team of students—volunteering in an emergency effort as erosion chips away at the site’s history—discovered a small glass flask inside an earthenware pot.
Inside the glass bottle was a note.
“It was an absolutely magic moment,” said Guillaume Blondel, head of the town of Eu’s archaeological service, according to the BBC. “We knew there had been excavations here in the past, but to find this message from 200 years ago… it was a total surprise.”
After the team speculated about the potential of the note’s contents, they carefully extracted the paper and found: “P.J. Feret, a native of Dieppe, member of various intellectual societies, carried out excavations here in January 1825. He continues his investigations in this vast area known as the Cite de Limes or Caesar’s Camp.”
An archaeologist’s message to future archaeologists. “Sometimes you see these time capsules left behind by carpenters when they build houses,” Blondel said. “But it’s very rare in archaeology. Most archaeologists prefer to think that there won’t be anyone coming after them because they’ve done all the work.”
Feret is credited as the first archaeologist to sift through the village. “He wanted to dismantle an ancient theory which spoke of a Carolingian presence,” said Blondel, according to a translation from French-language Actu. “He was the first to excavate and discover elements attesting to the Gallic presence.”
The initial find was made by a history student in Caen named Pierre, Actu reported. Pierre saw the top of a strange object in a trench, and after the team ensured it wasn’t a bomb from World War II, they removed the pot. “This pot was covered with a small, glazed cup,” Blondel said. “And we saw a white glass object protruding from it.”
The glass bottle was a vial, like the kind women once wore around their necks filled with smelling salts. The note was inside, rolled and tied with string. Apart from the 200-year-old message, the students also discovered plenty of 2,000-year-old artifacts—mostly pieces of pottery—as they searched for evidence of Gallic occupation.
Along the way, they found a love letter to their line of work.
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