Saint-Bélec slab (possible Bronze Age map)
Losa de Saint-Bélec (posible mapa de la edad del Bronce)
- Date
- c. 1900 BCE (entre 2150 y 1600 BCE) · confidence medium
- Place
- Leuhan, Finistère, Brittany, France
- Credited to
- Early Bronze Age societies of Armorica
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
An engraved stone slab that covered a tomb and is interpreted as a scaled depiction of the Odet valley, with relief and river networks. It would be one of the oldest surviving topographic maps in Europe.
The slab was found in 1900 in a tomb and recognised as a possible map in 2021; it was published in 2024. The specific cartographic reading (which territory, what scale) is its researchers' hypothesis and is not unanimous.
What it led to
- reading the landscape as a territorial record in the Atlantic Early Bronze Age
- rethinking the antiquity of scaled mapmaking in western Europe