On a limestone plateau north of Tours, overlooking the small valley of the La Perrée stream, French archaeologists have fully excavated a rare Gallic rural settlement whose ditches concealed two remarkable objects, a crudely carved limestone statue with a still-visible human face, and an iron sword deliberately destroyed before being thrown away. Stranger still, the site's animal bones reveal that during its earliest phase, its inhabitants practiced horse butchery on a scale rarely documented anywhere in the region.
The newly discovered statue at the archaeological site. Credit: François Cherdo, Inrap.
The excavation, carried out by France’s National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, known as Inrap, covered 3.5 hectares at a place called Le Désert, in the commune of Mettray, ahead of development work by Tours Métropole. The work was led by Inrap archaeologist François Cherdo, under the scientific oversight of the regional archaeology service of the Centre-Val de Loire. Inrap announced the results on July 20, 2026, describing the site as among the best furnished with remarkable objects anywhere in this geographic sector.
A farmstead of the late Gallic world
The land at Le Désert had drawn people long before the Gauls. Excavators recovered numerous stone tools from reworked deposits attributable mainly to the Middle Paleolithic, including a handaxe, along with sparser traces of Neolithic, Late Bronze Age, and First Iron Age activity, the latter dating to the Middle Hallstatt period, roughly 625 to 540 BC.
The main occupation, however, belongs to the Second Iron Age, specifically the phase archaeologists call La Tène D1, spanning 150 to 80 BC, the final generations of independent Gaul before Caesar’s conquest. Almost the entire settlement could be studied, a rarity in itself. It takes the form of a rectangular residential enclosure covering 1.2 hectares, bounded by three straight ditches, with a wide internal partition ditch, equipped with a central crossing point, dividing the interior into two functional zones. Sterile bands along the inner edges of the ditches suggest earthen banks once stood there, since leveled by centuries of plowing. Stratigraphic analysis of the ditch fills points to two successive phases of occupation.
The eastern courtyard held a building founded on four posts, along with a crossing structure marked by two unusually large postholes. The western courtyard grouped four buildings, two of which show at least one episode of remodeling after their original construction. Outside the enclosure, a secondary network of field ditches managed water across the sector and organized spaces given over to craft and agropastoral activities.
Drone view of the Gallic settlement. Credit: Brice Beauchesne.
A face worn almost to nothing
The site’s most evocative find came from the southern enclosure ditch. There, at the stratigraphic level marking the transition between the settlement’s two occupation phases, excavators recovered a limestone statue standing 49 centimeters tall and weighing more than 18 kilograms. The stone itself is full of imperfections, and the carving is heavily worn, yet a human face still comes through, eyes, a nose, a mouth, and the beginning of a head of hair.
What makes the statue significant is less its artistry than its fate. The deliberate discarding of an aesthetic object of this kind within a domestic context, Inrap notes, carries strong symbolic weight, and the researchers read it as a probable cultic gesture. That reading gains force from what accompanied it. Ninety meters away, in the same ditch and in a synchronous stratigraphic level, excavators found fragments of a human braincase, interpreted as a memorial piece discarded as part of the same episode, whatever ritual logic connected a worn stone face and pieces of a human skull thrown into the boundary ditch of a working farm.
The sword preserved in its sheath. Credit: François Cherdo, Inrap.
A sword killed before burial
The second remarkable object came from the internal partition ditch, close to the crossing point that controlled movement within the residential enclosure. It is an iron sword, still accompanied by its scabbard, and it did not go into the ground intact. The weapon had been deliberately mutilated to render it completely unusable, a ritual act well documented in the Celtic world, where weapons were often ceremonially “killed” before deposition. The act, followed by the sword’s disposal, took place at the very end of the enclosure’s occupation, and the researchers suggest it may have symbolized the formal abandonment of the residence itself, a farewell performed in iron.
The horse butchers of Mettray
Alongside these singular objects, the everyday material tells the story of a largely self-sufficient community. Evidence of ironworking, grain milling, textile production, cooking, and the processing of animal resources runs through both phases of occupation, with perceptible reorganizations between them.
One activity stands out sharply from that ordinary picture. The study of the animal remains revealed butchery focused specifically on horses, reaching notably high proportions during the settlement’s first phase of occupation. In most of Gaul, horses were valuable animals associated with riding, traction, and status far more than with the table, which makes the scale of horse processing at Mettray genuinely atypical. Inrap’s summary is measured on the point, noting that while the site’s form and most of its activities match what is classically recognized for settlements of this period, the specificity of its horse husbandry during the first phase sets it apart, without the evidence yet allowing a firm explanation of whether the practice reflects dietary custom, ritual consumption, a specialized economic role, or some combination of the three.
Taken together, the fully excavated enclosure, the statue, the killed sword, the skull fragments, and the unusual horse butchery make Le Désert a substantial addition to what is known about rural life on the plateau north of Tours in the last century of Gallic independence, an ordinary farm, in most respects, that marked its own turning points in decidedly extraordinary ways.
Source. Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, Inrap (July 20, 2026). Excavation led by François Cherdo, with Tours Métropole and the Service régional de l’archéologie, Drac Centre-Val de Loire.