The Gauls of Acy-Romance: Discovering the Remi

Visitors to the village of Acy-Romance north of the modern day French city of Rheims, will see no sign of the Gallic village that was once there. However, very unusually, this village has been fully excavated.

A succession of digs over fifteen years, plot by plot, has revealed the full details of the little Gallic settlement that stood here some 2200 years ago, in the heart of the territory of the Remi tribe.
You can now take a virtual tour of the village.

Set on a plain above the Aisne valley, it was structured around a religious centre comprising a burial mound with an ancestral tomb, a large square and five buildings, the “temples”.

Around this stood the residential quarters, with livestock farmers to the northeast, arable farmers to the east, artisans to the southeast and labourers (probably slaves) to the north.
Items discovered on the site during its excavation have revealed the way of life and standard of living of the people who lived there, what they did in their daily life and their carefully structured and highly sophisticated funerary practices.

The complex burials of young men near the main temple suggest the possibility of human sacrifice.

The virtual tour



With an amazing 3D recreation of the village of Acy-Romance, 500 documents including photos, plans, interactive documents and animated sequences, the website presents the very latest research on Gallic civilisation in a dynamic, clear and user-friendly format.

This multimedia production provides an opportunity to mention the commitment of the team of volunteer archaeologists whose excavation work has revealed one of the largest Gallic sites ever to be studied and whose research has revolutionised our understanding of Gallic civilisation.



The Great Archaeological Sites multimedia collection

Designed by Bernard Lambot and available in French and English versions, this website is the twentieth to be included in the collection of Great Archaeological Sites produced by the Secretariat General of the Department for Higher Education, Research and Technology, in collaboration with the Archaeology Service of the Directorate General for Heritage. Following the publication of the websites on the Southern Gauls (Entremont in Provence and Lattes in Languedoc), it has turned the spotlight onto the Northeastern Gauls, with a collection covering the different periods, from Prehistory to the modern era, including sites such as Lascaux, Saint-Denis and the Saint-Malo shipwrecks.
http://www.pasthorizonspr.com/index.php/archives/03/2012/the-gauls-of-acy-romance-discovering-the-remi