On the Structure and Terminology of the Gaulish Calendar

The so-called Coligny Calendar was discovered in November 1897 by a Monsieur Roux in a field north of Coligny (Ain, France). He came across the fragments of a buried statue of a young male deity and, with it, the broken-up remains of what had once been a large bronze plaque. The more than 150 individual fragments, most of which bore writings and numerical values aligned to vertical lines of holes, were quickly recognized as pieces of a calendar, written in Roman capitals. The language was later recognized as Gaulish. The analysis proposed in this volume is that the plaque does not bear a solar calendar, but shows essentially the structure of a lunar calendar, based on a given yearly lunation pattern, and adapted to the solar course by means of two intercalary months.