Entremont

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The plateau breaks off in a low cliff at its southern lip, and from that edge the ground falls away toward a cluster of springs three kilometers below. A traveler standing on the height looks down on the roofs of Aix-en-Provence; a traveler standing among those roofs, looking up, sees a bare shelf of limestone with the lines of old walls along its rim. The two places are bound together by what happened between them. The town on the plateau came first and was destroyed; the town at the springs was raised by the army that destroyed it, and took its waters for a name. The upper place is called Entremont, and for something more than a century it was the chief town of a people whose gods kept the heads of the dead.

The town of the Salyes

Entremont was an oppidum — a walled hilltop town of the kind the Iron Age peoples of temperate Europe built across the second and first centuries before the common era — and it was the capital of the Salyes. The Salyes, the Salluvii or Saluvii of the Roman writers, were the great confederation of lower Provence, a Celto-Ligurian people whose lands lay between the Rhône, the Durance, the sea, and the inland ridges. Celto-Ligurian is a careful term for a real fusion: along this Mediterranean shore the older Ligurian population and the Celtic speech and craft that had spread south through Gaul grew together until the seam between them can no longer be cleanly drawn. They shared a country with the Greek colony of Massalia — modern Marseille — which had traded wine, oil, and coined silver up the river valleys for centuries, and the art of Entremont shows a hand schooled in part by that contact and in part wholly its own.

The settlement on the plateau was built up in the first decades of the second century BCE — the excavated evidence points to a foundation between about 180 and 170, on the southern edge of the Puyricard plateau a little north of the springs the Romans would later call Aquae Sextiae. It grew in two stages, which the first modern excavator named the Ville Haute and the Ville Basse, the upper and lower town. The upper town, the older nucleus, sat at the point of the plateau behind its strongest defenses; the lower town spread out below and around it as the place prospered, enclosed in its turn by a second line of wall. The whole covered some three and a half hectares within its ramparts — a wall of dressed stone reinforced with projecting towers, the standard military architecture of the southern oppida, set where the natural fall of the ground already made the approach hard.

Inside the walls Entremont was a town in the full sense, not a refuge or a bare fort. Excavation has traced a grid of streets, blocks of houses built close together with party walls, hearths and storage pits, presses and workshops — the working fabric of a community that pressed oil, worked metal and stone, stored grain, and struck or used coin. It was a place of perhaps a few thousand people at its height. And set within that fabric, near the gate of the upper town, was a sanctuary: a precinct of carved and painted stone where the dead and the gods were kept. It is the sanctuary, and what it held, that has made the name of Entremont.

The seated heroes and the architecture of the head

What Entremont preserves, more fully than almost any other site of the western Celts, is a body of carved stone in which the human head is the governing form. The sculpture was found broken and scattered through the ruins, much of it reused as rubble in late repairs to the walls, and its reconstruction has been the slow work of the museum; but enough survives, and enough joins, to show what the sanctuary once displayed.

Limestone relief of four severed heads from the sanctuary of Entremont, in the Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence. Michel wal, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

There are first the heads themselves, carved in the stone. Pillars and lintels were worked with severed human heads — single faces, and faces gathered in rows and clusters, life-sized, shown straight-on, beardless, the eyes heavy-lidded or closed, the cheeks hollow, the mouths thin and turned down at the corners. They are the faces of the slain or of the dead: not the bright masks of living men but countenances with the life drawn out of them, fixed in the soft limestone with a flat, frontal stillness. One reconstructed block carries four such heads side by side; others belonged to pillars that stood upright in the precinct, so that a visitor passing into the sanctuary moved between shafts of stone faces. The carving was painted, as the southern sculpture generally was, so that the gray reliefs now seen in the museum were once colored and far more vivid in their effect.

Then there are the seated figures. From Entremont came the heads and torsos of several male statues, carved larger than life and shown sitting cross-legged, the legs folded beneath the body in the posture that the Gaulish gods themselves are shown holding — the same attitude in which the antlered lord of the beasts presides over the cauldron-imagery of the north. The seated men of Entremont wear the marks of rank and arms: a torc, the twisted neck-ring that was the badge of standing across the Celtic world; in places a cuirass or breastplate; and, in the most telling of the group, a hand laid flat upon a severed human head resting on the knee or against the body. They are usually read as heroized warriors — chiefs or champions of the people, shown in the repose of figures who sit where others stand, with the dead gathered about them. The dead they hold may be enemies they overcame or their own fallen kept in honor; the iconography establishes the rank and the relation without naming whose head lies beneath the hand.

Seated cross-legged stone warrior or hero from the oppidum of Entremont, Musée Granet, Aix-en-Provence. Michel wal, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

And then there is the bone. What sets Entremont apart from the carved witness alone is that the rite the sculpture shows was borne out in the sanctuary in fact. Among the ruins of the precinct excavators recovered real human skulls — adult, and where they could be sexed, male — and several of them carried the marks of the spikes by which they had been fixed. The bone of the forehead in these cases is pierced, a hole driven through to take a long nail or peg, so that the head could be hung or set upright on a beam or pillar for display. The stone faces of the lintels and the pierced skulls of the floor are the same practice in two materials: the sculpture is not a fancy but a record, and the record is confirmed in bone. The classical writers had reported that the Celts of the south kept the heads of the slain; at Entremont the keeping itself was found, the nail-holes still in the skulls.

For the head, in the religion of the continental Celts, was the seat of the person. It was where the self resided — where, as the World History Encyclopedia summarizes from the archaeology, the soul was held to dwell — and to keep a head was to keep the power of the one whose head it had been. The skulls of Entremont were not refuse and not trophies in a merely brutal sense. They were the most potent thing a person possessed, fixed in the stone of a holy place where that power could be guarded, honored, and drawn upon. The seated heroes presided over them; the carved faces of the lintels framed them; the precinct as a whole was an architecture raised over the conviction that the dwelling-place of the self could be held among the gods of the town. Within that frame the rite is whole and coherent: the head appears not as a horror but as the most carefully kept of all things, the residence of a person and the strength of the dead, gathered into the heart of the community and watched over by its gods.

The two witnesses, and the distance between them

Two kinds of evidence bear on what was done at Entremont, and they sit at very different removes from the thing itself.

Closest are the stones and the bone — the head-pillars, the seated heroes, the pierced skulls, the painted color, the streets and walls fallen into rubble. These are the Salyes speaking in their own material, without translation. They are silent on motive and on the words that accompanied the rite, but they are direct: this was built, these heads were carved and these skulls were pierced and set up, this was thrown down. No interpreter stands between the modern eye and the nail-hole in the bone.

Farther off stand the texts, and the texts are the work of outsiders. The Greek and Roman writers who described the Celts taking and keeping heads were strangers to the Salyes, and in the decisive case enemies; in several instances they were not eyewitnesses at all but copyists of a single earlier authority. The Greek polymath Posidonius traveled in southern Gaul in the early first century BCE and set down what he saw or was told, and though his own account is lost it stands behind the surviving reports of Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, who both drew on him. Through that chain comes the classical picture of the Celtic head: that warriors hung the severed heads of the slain from the necks of their horses and nailed them to the doorways of their houses, and that the heads of the most distinguished enemies were embalmed in cedar oil and kept, to be shown to guests with pride. The picture is external, interested, late relative to the practice, and shaped by a frame that cast the Celts as the savage opposite of the Mediterranean. It must be read at that distance — and yet at Entremont the practice those distant writers named is found materialized, the nailed head of their report answered by the pierced skull in the ground. The convergence of the strangers’ words and the people’s own stones is the most that can be claimed; the meaning the Salyes themselves gave the rite has to be read from the sanctuary, not from the men who described it from outside.

One question the precinct raises has divided its students and is unlikely to be closed. Were the heads kept here the honored dead of the Salyes themselves — kin and champions fixed among the gods so their power stayed with the living — or were they the heads of slain enemies, displayed as the texts say, war-trophies sanctified by their placing in the holy ground? That the skulls were of grown men in their strength has been taken to favor the enemy reading; yet a warrior people might as readily honor its own young dead, fallen in arms, by setting them among the gods. The likeliest answer admits both at once, for in a world where to hold an enemy’s head was to hold his strength, the same skull could be at once a thing taken and a person venerated, the two not opposed. The seated hero with his hand on a severed head holds, in either reading, the dead — and the stone does not say, and would not have needed to say, whose dead they were.

The razing, the springs, and the museum

The end of Entremont came from the south, out of the alliance between Rome and Massalia. In 125 BCE the Salyes pressed hard on the Greek city, and the Senate sent the consul Marcus Fulvius Flaccus — a man Rome would also remember as a partisan of the Gracchi — to its relief; he defeated the Salyes and the Vocontii and others and triumphed at Rome in 123. The reduction of the confederation was carried through by Gaius Sextius Calvinus, consul in 124 and then proconsul, who stormed the oppidum on its plateau and broke the power of the Salyes; he held his own triumph over the Ligurians, Vocontii, and Salluvii in 122. The town on the height was taken and thrown down, its sanctuary with it, and was finally abandoned within a generation, by about 90 BCE. At the springs three kilometers below, where his soldiers had camped, Calvinus founded a garrison-colony to hold the country and shield Massalia from the north. It took his name and the name of its waters: Aquae Sextiae, the Waters of Sextius, the town that became Aix-en-Provence. The capital of the Salyes ended as the quarry and the foundation-story of the Roman town beneath it.

Entremont lay largely undisturbed under its scrub for nearly two thousand years. Systematic excavation began in 1946 under Fernand Benoit, who cleared the ramparts, the streets and houses, and the precinct of the sanctuary, recovered the broken statuary from the rubble of the walls, and recognized the seated heroes, the head-pillars, and the pierced skulls for what they were; the work has continued on the plateau since, refining the plan and the chronology that the first campaigns laid out. The sculpture was gathered into Aix, where it remains: the seated cross-legged warriors, the lintels and pillars of severed heads, the fragments of horses, and the rest of the Celto-Ligurian stonework are held in the Musée Granet, in galleries given over to the oppidum and its art. The plateau itself is a protected site, walked today among the lines of its walls and the cuttings of its streets.

Entremont is rarely read alone. It stands with Roquepertuse — the sanctuary of the head-portico a short way to the west, where skulls were set into the niches of carved pillars beneath a stone bird — as the two great witnesses to what the study of Celtic religion calls the cult of the head: not a doctrine recovered from any Celtic book, for the continental Celts left almost none, but a pattern read across the southern sanctuaries and matched, with care, against the reports of the classical ethnographers and the druids whose teaching the Greeks and Romans tried to set down. The same reverence for the head surfaces far off and far later in the insular Celtic literature — the severed head that speaks, that guards, that presides over the feast — which the early students of the cult drew on to read the silent southern stones, though that long bridge across sea and centuries is itself a contested inference. Among the western sanctuaries Entremont keeps the fullest reckoning: not the portico of one shrine but a whole conquered town, its gods and its dead carved and pierced and set up together, and recovered from the rubble of the wall that fell on them. The seated heroes sit again in their gallery in Aix, hands on the heads of the dead, the closed stone eyes of the lintels turned outward, holding the faces of a people whose own voice is the stone.

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