Roquepertuse

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A low spur of pale limestone rises from the plain northwest of Aix-en-Provence, near the village of Velaux, where the inland hills break toward the Étang de Berre. The rock is unremarkable in itself — a modest height of a few dozen meters, dry and scrubbed with thyme. But in the third and second centuries before the common era a community of the country dressed its summit with cut stone: a paved platform some fifty meters by twenty, and on it a portico of pillars and lintels carved from the same soft rock. Into the standing pillars they cut deep niches, and into the niches they set human skulls. The place is called Roquepertuse, the “pierced rock,” and the name was given long before anyone understood how literally the pillars themselves had been pierced to hold the dead.

A sanctuary in the country of the Salyes

The hill stands in what was, in the Iron Age, the territory of the Salyes — the Salluvii or Saluvii, the great confederation of lower Provence whose lands ran between the Rhône, the Durance, the Var, and the long ridge of the Luberon. They were a Celto-Ligurian people: a population in which the older Ligurian inhabitants of the Mediterranean shore and the Celtic ways that spread south through Gaul had grown together, sharing speech and craft and gods until the seam between them can no longer be cleanly found. This was a borderland in more than one sense. Along the coast the Greek colony of Massalia — modern Marseille — had traded for centuries, sending wine and oil and coined silver up the river valleys; behind it the open country belonged to the touta, the tribe, and to its sanctuaries. Roquepertuse sat in that meeting-ground, neither Greek nor purely Celtic, and its art shows both hands at work.

The dating of the site has shifted as it has been studied. The earliest excavators, working before the First World War and through the 1920s, supposed the sanctuary belonged to the very eve of the Roman conquest. Later scrutiny pushed the principal phase back into the third century BCE, with some of the statuary — and the cult itself — likely older still, reaching toward the founding centuries of the Iron Age settlement. The Provençal hinterland that Marseille’s archaeologists later mapped held a whole Celto-Ligurian world of village communities, their arts and funeral rites traceable across the eighth to the first centuries BCE, and Roquepertuse was one of its holy places. What is certain is the end. When Rome moved against the Salyes — Marcus Fulvius Flaccus campaigning against the confederation, and in 123 BCE the proconsul Gaius Sextius Calvinus storming their hilltop capital at nearby Entremont and founding the garrison-colony of Aquae Sextiae, the future Aix — the sanctuaries of the country went down with the oppida. Roquepertuse was thrown to the ground; the date conventionally given for its destruction is 124 BCE, in the first of the two campaigns. The pillars fell, the skulls scattered, and the stone heroes lay broken on the platform until the twentieth century lifted them again.

The site is small. There was no city here, no defended town like the one on its neighboring height. Roquepertuse appears to have been a sanctuary proper — a place set apart for the gods and the dead, approached and ascended rather than lived in, its single great architectural gesture the painted portico that opened onto the platform. In that respect it belongs with the other open-air holy places of the continental Celts, the war-enclosure of Gournay-sur-Aronde in the north and the healing spring of Fontes Sequanae in Burgundy among them — each a sanctuary that speaks, through what was deposited or built there, in the Gauls’ own voice rather than through the pens of strangers.

The architecture of the head

What Roquepertuse holds, and what makes it unlike any other surviving monument of the western Celts, is the architecture of the human head.

Three carved limestone pillars from Roquepertuse with carved skull niches, in the Musée d’archéologie méditerranéenne, Marseille. Mark Landon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The pillars of the portico are squared shafts of limestone, and the deep cup-shaped cavities cut into them were not ornamental. They were made to hold heads. When Count Henri de Gérin-Ricard excavated the platform in the campaigns of 1917 to 1927, he found human skulls still lodged within the niches — the bone resting in the stone that had been carved to receive it. Later study of the surviving skulls reported that they belonged to adult males, none past about the age of forty: men in the strength of life. That detail has weighed heavily in every argument since about whose heads these were.

The pillars were also painted. Traces of pigment survive — reds, and the figures of horses and fish and foliage worked in color across the stone — so that the portico a visitor approached was not the bare gray ruin now seen in the museum but a bright, charged threshold, its niches dark with their contents. Above it, set over the lintels, perched a large carved bird, wings half opened, a raptor or a goose-like fowl of stone roughly sixty centimeters across.

Carved limestone bird from the portico of Roquepertuse, wings half spread, in the Musée d’archéologie méditerranéenne, Marseille. Mark Landon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The bird stood as a presence of the otherworld set above the place of the heads. Birds carry the dead in much Celtic imagery, and a fowl perched over a doorway of skulls reads as a guardian of the passage between the living and what lies beyond it — though the precise meaning the Salyes gave it is gone with them. Among the carved blocks recovered was also a lintel worked with paired horses’ heads, the horse being among the most charged of Celtic beasts, the companion of warriors and a creature of the gods.

Beside the portico were found the seated figures. Two stone statues — and fragments of others — show men sitting cross-legged, the legs folded beneath the body in the posture the Gaulish gods themselves are shown holding, the same attitude in which the antlered lord of the beasts presides on the great cauldron-imagery of the north.

Cross-legged seated stone warrior or hero from Roquepertuse, front view, Musée d’archéologie méditerranéenne, Marseille. Mark Landon, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 4.0.

The seated men of Roquepertuse have been read as warriors, as heroes, as honored dead, or as the gods to whom the sanctuary was raised; the iconography does not decide among them. Their kin at Entremont, carved with armor and torcs and in one case a hand laid upon a severed head, make the warrior reading attractive for the whole group. What the posture establishes is rank and repose — a figure that sits, in stillness, where lesser beings stand.

And then the double head. From Roquepertuse came a carved limestone block bearing two faces joined back to back, looking opposite ways beneath a single covering — a tête janiforme, a two-faced head of the kind that recurs across the Celtic world, sometimes called by analogy to the Roman two-faced god a “Janus” head, though the comparison is borrowed and not native. The two faces share one body of stone and one fate; whether they represent a single being who sees both ways, the paired dead, or a divinity of thresholds, the carving does not say. It is among the most reproduced objects of the Celto-Ligurian south, and it sits at the center of the question the whole sanctuary poses: what did the head mean to the people who built this?

For the head, in the religion of the continental Celts, was the seat of the person. It was where the self resided — where, in the understanding the World History Encyclopedia summarizes from the archaeology, the soul was held to dwell. To keep a head was to keep the power of the one whose head it was. The skulls set into the pillars of Roquepertuse were not refuse and not mere trophies of a brutal sort; they were the most potent thing a person possessed, fixed in the stone of a holy place where their power could be guarded, honored, drawn upon, or contained. The portico was, in this reading, a reliquary of persons — an architecture built to house the dwelling-place of selves.

The witness of the stones and the witness of the strangers

Two kinds of evidence bear on what happened here, and they sit at very different distances from the thing itself.

Closest are the stones. The pillars, the skulls in their niches, the bird, the seated heroes, the double head, the painted color, the fallen platform — these are the Salyes speaking in their own material, without translation. They are mute on motive and meaning, but they are direct: this was built, these heads were set here, this was thrown down. No one stands between the modern observer and the carved cavity that once held a skull.

Farther off stand the texts, and they are the work of outsiders. The Greek and Roman writers who described the Celts taking and keeping heads were strangers to the Salyes, often their enemies, and in several cases were not even eyewitnesses but copyists of a single earlier authority. The Greek polymath Posidonius traveled in southern Gaul in the early first century BCE and wrote what he saw or was told; his account does not survive whole, but it stands behind the surviving reports of Diodorus Siculus and Strabo, both of whom drew on him. Through that chain comes the picture the classical world held of the Celtic head: that warriors returning from battle 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 visitors with pride. The reports are external, interested, late relative to the practice, and filtered through a frame that cast the Celts as the savage opposite of the civilized Mediterranean. They must be read at that distance.

What is striking is that at Roquepertuse the practice those distant writers described stands materialized in stone. The texts and the archaeology, approaching from opposite directions, converge on the same fact: that the head mattered here above all else, and that heads were kept in holy places. The convergence is real; the interpretation of it is where the certainty stops.

For the central question the sanctuary raises has never been settled. Were the heads in the pillars the honored dead of the Salyes themselves — ancestors, kept near the gods so that 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? The finding that the skulls were all of men under forty has been taken to favor the enemy reading: these would be warriors killed in their prime, not elders who died at home. Yet a warrior people might equally honor its own young dead, fallen in arms, by fixing them among the gods. Scholars have suspected both at Roquepertuse and at its neighbors, and the likeliest answer admits both at once — that the same head could be at once a trophy taken and a person venerated, the two not opposed in a world where to hold an enemy’s head was to hold his strength. The evidence of the stones does not choose, and the strangers’ texts cannot be trusted to choose for them.

Excavation, museum, and the reading of the head

A statue was first noticed at Roquepertuse early in the nineteenth century, and one buried figure was cleared in 1860, but the sanctuary was not understood until Henri de Gérin-Ricard’s excavations between 1917 and 1927 uncovered the portico, the pillars, the skulls, the bird, and the seated figures, and recognized the platform for what it was. The sculptures were gathered into Marseille, where they remain: the seated heroes, the bird, the carved pillars, the lintel of horses, and the double head are held in the Musée d’archéologie méditerranéenne in the Centre de la Vieille Charité, in a hall given over to the Celto-Ligurian civilization of the Provençal hinterland. The hilltop itself was classed as a protected historic monument in 1967. Modern excavation has continued to refine the chronology and to recover the painted surfaces and the structural plan that the early diggers, working with the methods of their day, could only partly grasp.

Roquepertuse is almost never discussed alone. It stands with Entremont — the great oppidum-capital of the Salyes a short distance away, where carved pillars with skull-niches, statues of seated warriors, and a relief of severed heads were also found, and where some skulls bore the marks of having been pierced for hanging — and with the sanctuary at nearby Glanum, as one of the cluster of southern Gaulish sites where the cult of the head is most plainly preserved. Together they form the archaeological core of what the study of Celtic religion calls the cult of the head: not a doctrine recovered from any Celtic text, for the continental Celts left almost none, but a pattern read across the sanctuaries and matched, cautiously, against the reports of the classical ethnographers and the druids whose teaching the Greeks and Romans tried to describe. The same reverence for the head surfaces far away in the insular Celtic literature written down centuries later — the talking severed head of legend, the head that guards and prophesies — which the early scholars of the cult drew upon to read the silent southern stones, though that long bridge across time and sea is itself a contested inference.

Within the frame of the people who raised it, the meaning was whole: the head held the self, and the self’s power could be kept. The platform at Velaux was the architecture of that conviction — a threshold of painted stone, watched over by its bird, where the dwelling-places of persons were fixed among the gods. The Roman campaign that founded Aix swept the sanctuary away within a generation or two of its full flowering, and the interpretatio of the conquerors had no patience for a shrine of skulls. What the spade returned, and the museum now keeps, is the building itself: the pillars still bearing the niches cut to a human measure, asking of every visitor the question the stones will not answer.

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