What an Ancient Wall Beneath Paris Reveals About Caesar’s Propaganda Machine

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If you asked an ancient Roman what Julius Caesar’s biggest accomplishment was, they would probably tell you that it was the conquest of Gaul, a region that included modern-day France, and its impulsive "war-mad" inhabitants." Caesar tells us about it himself, in the third person, in The Gallic Wars. He claims he enslaved a million Gauls and killed a million others. And in his view, they had it coming: While some of the Gallic tribes were tolerable, they were in general fickle, credulous, scatterbrained, and menacing. Worse, he wrote, their religious leaders, the Druids, practiced human sacrifice in ways that are quite literally the stuff of horror movies—burning people alive inside large wicker figures. (There’s no archaeological evidence to support this claim.)

Along the way, Caesar also boasts of his lieutenant Labienus’s strategic victory in Lutetia—an ancient settlement of the Parisii tribe in what is now Paris—in 52 B.C. When tipped off about the Roman army’s imminent arrival, the Parisii set fire to their stronghold on an island in the middle of the Seine, destroyed its bridges, and set up camp on the banks of the river across from the Romans. A master tactician, Labienus feigned a retreat, luring the Parisii out as he quietly dispatched troops four miles upstream to cross the river. Outmatched and outwitted, says Caesar, the Gauls “were surrounded and slain.” 

The recent discovery of a charred wall believed to be the remains of the ancient settlement on the Île de la Cité, an island in the heart of modern-day Paris, lends some credibility to Caesar’s version of events. However, it also hints at the reality behind Roman propaganda about the Gauls and the true motives of the Parisii at Lutetia. 

The discovery came this past summer. Unearthed under the Hôtel-Dieu hospital close to Notre Dame Cathedral, the 65-foot stone-and-wood wall is thought to have been part of the ramparts of Lutetia. A statement released by the French Ministry of Culture said that charred remains from the site have been carbon-dated to between 200 and 10 B.C., seemingly settling a matter that has long been up for debate: Some scholars have argued that ancient Lutetia was not on an island as Caesar described but in Nanterre, a suburb of modern Paris. 

Carbon dating for this period is notoriously challenging, but when I spoke to Greg Woolf, director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and author of Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul, he told me that the official interpretation of the find “seems plausible enough.” The reason for this, he explained, is that the Celts of this period—a larger group of tribes of which the Gallic tribes were a part—used a particular kind of rampart known as the murus gallicus. It is “made from enormous timbers, usually of oak, which are laid out flat on a grid, so it’s like a box. You fill it with earth and you nail it together with enormous nails. And then you put a stone facing on and this produces a monumental wall,” said Woolf. Caesar himself describes these ramparts as “eminently suitable for the practical defense of cities.” 

About 50 of these Celtic walls have been excavated across modern-day France and Germany and they all date to this period in the second century B.C., shortly after the Roman conquest. Some of them are huge. The example from Mont Beuvray—the home of the Aedui tribe in Burgundy—is estimated to have involved 10,000 cubic meters of wood and 30 tons of iron for the nails alone. Ian Ralston, an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh and an expert in Celtic fortifications who excavated at Mont Beuvray, told me that the nails were “not the kind of thing a village blacksmith could have produced”—they required a big iron industry to manufacture. 

One of the interesting things about the wall found in Paris is that there has been no mention of any kind of spike used to secure the internal timbers. “The wall in Paris is a murus gallicus, but it’s not a top-of-the-line model,” Ralston said, adding that even more advanced ramparts made with nails “were becoming obsolete by the end of the Gallic Wars.” They were being replaced by a newer defensive structure that included an engineered bank and large ditch, which were much more effective against Roman artillery. The handful of sites that Caesar failed to capture featured this kind of defensive structure, Ralston said. 

On the Île de la Cité, a lack of resources and the constraints of being positioned on a developed island may have made it impossible for defenses to be updated. This, Ralston said, might explain why residents abandoned Lutetia. “They realized that the site was indefensible and set a fire to stop anything useful from falling into Roman hands.”

This gives us a glimpse behind the thick veil of Roman propaganda about the Celts—and particularly the Gauls, whom Caesar presents as simpleminded warriors, administratively unstable, and religiously perverse. 

The remains of Celtic fortresses tell a different story. The walls at sites like Mont Beuvray were impressive and built to intimidate—with huge gates comparable to the monumental Lion Gate that marks the entrance to the citadel of Mycenae in southern Greece. In the 500 years prior to the Roman conquest, said Woolf, a “sleeping giant” had awakened in central Europe with the arrival of the Iron Age. Iron allowed people to plow deeper soils and to cut down massive trees for constructing ramparts. 

As a result of this technological transformation, life in Celtic Gaul was good. The territory was far richer than Caesar’s homeland in the Mediterranean. The thicker soils and higher rainfall made Gaul less vulnerable to the famines and food crises that plagued southern Italy. The Gauls also had lots of horses, whereas Roman horses were “scrawny little things without nice grass to eat in the summer,” Woolf said. “In a later period, Romans would recruit their horsemen from northern Gaul and Germany because the Mediterranean horses are not so great.” 

And even though Romans are famous for their engineering, these Celts weren’t far behind. When the Romans arrived in Gaul, it was Celtic roads and bridges that they used to traverse the region. The Gauls also had excellent drainage systems, sacred wells, and writing. They don’t appear to have had texts, but archaeologists have unearthed curse tablets and inscriptions on swords that reveal that they were more cultured than the Romans would have us believe. 

They have suffered, thanks to the Romans, from some bad publicity. During the Gallic Wars, said Woolf, the “Romans see the Gauls as unlike themselves, sort of militaristic, wild, and mobile, but by the time they actually get to know them, they realize that this isn't quite true.” But by then the damage was already done. The discovery in Paris helps explain why the Gauls made the choices that they did. Perhaps realizing that their defense technology was behind the times, they made the strategic decision to burn their stronghold to prevent it from falling into the hands of their enemies. They may have lost the battle at Lutetia, but they were far from the wild and unfocused rabble that Caesar claimed them to be. 

World’s Oldest Shipwreck Found in Turkey?

Archaeologists working off the southern coast of Turkey have unearthed a 4,700-year-old shipwreck believed to be the oldest ever discovered. The nearly 33-foot-long trade ship was transporting cargo—likely olive oil or wine—across the Mediterranean when it sank. The discovery near Turkey’s Kekova Island was made four years ago, but archaeologists initially thought that the vessel was only a few hundred years old. Closer examination of 30 ceramic storage jars (amphorae) in the wreck revealed that they share distinctive characteristics with 5,000-year-old Egyptian pottery. Other artifacts found at the site also seem to confirm the earlier dating. Hakan Öniz, professor at Akdeniz University in Antalya, who led the excavations, said that they are “generally confident” that this is the oldest shipwreck in the world.

Among the remarkably well preserved artifacts is an amphora bearing marks and holes suggesting that it could have been used to churn butter or cheese. The researchers suggest that the seafarers took goats with them on their voyages and used their milk to make dairy products like goat cheese. Paired with the wine and olive oil on board, those voyagers would have had the makings of a decent snack. 

Neanderthals Might Have Liked Woodworking Class

A growing body of evidence suggests that far from being simple cave dwellers, Neanderthals were skilled craftsmen with wood. A new article in Science Advances reveals the discovery of a trove of wooden tools at Abric Romaní, a Middle Paleolithic site outside Barcelona. Dated to between 60,000 and 40,000 years ago, these wooden remnants—found by a team led by Palmira Saladié at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution—include digging sticks, spears, a clublike object, structural poles possibly used for shelter, and artifacts that may have served as trays or containers. This new cache of evidence joins recent discoveries of wooden objects preserved in mud from Germany, Italy, and Greece that were most likely made by Neanderthals. All of this suggests, as we wrote in our last issue of Stones & Bones, that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than the knuckle-dragging caricatures would have us believe.

New Clue to the Identity of a Mystery Skeleton

A 1,700-year-old Roman sarcophagus at Westminster Abbey has been hiding a secret. The limestone coffin bears an inscription to Valerius Amandinus, a wealthy Briton who lived around A.D. 300 to 400, but its lid also bears a Latin cross dating from roughly the 10th or 11th century. The dueling dates have puzzled researchers ever since the coffin was excavated in the 19th century. A new analysis by Warwick Rodwell, consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, concludes that the bones inside belonged to a high-ranking medieval monk, most likely Abbot Aelfwig, who died around 1020, or his successor Wulnoth, who died in 1049. Rodwell slightly favors Aelfwig as the man behind the skeleton because he was already a Westminster monk.

That’s not the only thing scientists have learned about the skeleton in recent years. A 2025 analysis by James Young Langthorne of Pre-Construct Archaeology found the man was between the ages of 35 and 49 and about five feet nine inches tall. Furthermore, carbon dating placed the remains between A.D. 987 and 1052, confirming that the Roman-era sarcophagus was reused and its lid re-carved in the late Saxon period.