User:Auric/Petrified French tools

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Sometime between 1786 and 1788, workers quarrying soft limestone near Aix-en-Provence to rebuild the Palace of Justice, discovered a quantity of what appeared to be petrified wooden tools, not dissimilar to their own equipment, including a broken type of agate that appeared to have been a quarryman's board. The reassembled board was 7–8 feet (2.1–2.4 m) long and an inch thick. Also found were stumps of pillars and half-worked rock, as well as coins. The tools and associated artefacts were found in a bed of sand 50 feet (15 m) deep and 11 layers below the original ground level.^[1]^[2]

Also mentioned in the Count de Bournon's Mineralogy.^[3]

Modern interpretation

It is possible these were the remains of a petrified forest^[4], although this does not explain the coins.

References

^ "Curious Geological Facts". American Journal of Science and Arts. 2 (1): 145–46. 1820. Retrieved 10 December 2012. Beneath the 11th layer of limestone they came to a bed of sand and began to remove it to get at the rock underneath. But in the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars and fragments of half worked rock, the same stone and rock that they themselves had been excavating. they dug further and found coins, the petrified wooden handles of hammers, and pieces of other petrified wooden tools. Finally they came to a large wooden board, seven or eight feet long and an inch thick. like the wooden tools, it had also been petrified into a form of agate and it had been broken into pieces. When the pieces were reassembled, the workmen saw before them a quarryman's board of exactly the same kind they themselves used, worn in just the same way as their own boards were, with rounded, wavy edges.
^ chief contributing writer: Richard Marshall (1982). Mysteries of the unexplained. contributing writers: Monte Davis, Valerie Moolman, Georg Zappler (Repr. with amendments ed.). Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader's Digest Association. pp. 47–48. ISBN 0895771462.
^ "BOURNON, Jacques-Louis, Comte de. (1751 - 1825)". The Mineralogical Record. Archived from the original on Sep 30, 2011.
^ Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews (17 July 2007). "Tools in rock at Aix-en-Provence". Bad Archaeology. Retrieved 23 December 2016.

[1] "Curious Geological Facts". American Journal of Science and Arts. 2 (1): 145–46. 1820. Retrieved 10 December 2012. Beneath the 11th layer of limestone they came to a bed of sand and began to remove it to get at the rock underneath. But in the sand they found the stumps of stone pillars and fragments of half worked rock, the same stone and rock that they themselves had been excavating. they dug further and found coins, the petrified wooden handles of hammers, and pieces of other petrified wooden tools. Finally they came to a large wooden board, seven or eight feet long and an inch thick. like the wooden tools, it had also been petrified into a form of agate and it had been broken into pieces. When the pieces were reassembled, the workmen saw before them a quarryman's board of exactly the same kind they themselves used, worn in just the same way as their own boards were, with rounded, wavy edges.

[2] tributing writer: Richard Marshall (1982). Mysteries of the unexplained. contributing writers: Monte Davis, Valerie Moolman, Georg Zappler (Repr. with amendments ed.). Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader's Digest Association. pp. 47–48. ISBN 0895771462.

[3] "BOURNON, Jacques-Louis, Comte de. (1751 - 1825)". The Mineralogical Record. Archived from the original on Sep 30, 2011.

[4] Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews (17 July 2007). "Tools in rock at Aix-en-Provence". Bad Archaeology. Retrieved 23 December 2016.

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