Rennes-le-Château, history and myth in competition

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In a small French village, discussions of medieval heretics and history have become combined by modern tourists. Popular literature has only added to the issue. Since the publication of pieces like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the Da Vinci Code, the line between fact and fiction has grown thin. In 1965, excavations in Rennes-le-Château, the village which produced the original legend from which these fictions draw their fact, were banned. This stemmed from the multitude of treasure hunters who believed there were great stores of gold or the Holy Grail to be discovered. Some of the most extreme acts of destruction involved breaking a church altar, and disrupting graves. In the 1990s, a tourism initiative was launched to promote the Aude region as “Cathar Country”. Now modern day visitors come for the legends and romanticised versions of the Cathars and the Holy Grail, mixing myths and the history of a brutal genocide with esoteric assumptions, making it nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction. I seek to discuss the difficulty in presenting history to an audience to compete with myth, and the challenge in deciphering a history riddled with fiction and conspiracy when traditional archaeology is banned.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39166.0