It is impossible to regard this work as archaeological, as in accordance with the medieval way of thinking, the past was still interpreted through myth and biblical tradition. An excavation could not be of any scientific use because the motivation here was univocal and sacred, that is, to fill the parish reliquary.

With the Renaissance and the rediscovery of Greco-Roman antiquity, looking at the past became more rational. Society and ancient civilizations were questioned through ancient authors, and interest in the sometimes very evident vestiges of local antiquity was a natural consequence, vestiges that were finally interpreted as Gallo-Roman. For the same reason, the authorities of the city of Basel undertook large-scale excavations from 1582 to 1585 on the theater of Augusta Raurica.

For a long time, uncovered vestiges of monuments were not given their own significance and were still considered to be curiosities, at best, illustrations of a past that could be perceived only through history and philology. Unlike Nordic and Anglo-Saxon countries, Switzerland did not experience the romantic exaltation of Celtic antiquity. In Switzerland, the evidence of this remote past in the rural landscape was unreadable to the untrained eye, and calling upon the Celtic past could not answer any ideological need.

No period prior to the Roman occupation could be imagined in Switzerland. The Helvetians, remembered only as the protagonists in historical confrontations with the Romans, were regarded as their approximate contemporaries. So, regardless of the constraining limits of biblical chronology, one was unable, in the absence of Helvetian historians, to even imagine the possibility of any history for this people—just as a past for the primitive peoples of the New World could not be imagined.

Thus, all incomprehensible vestiges of the past were attributed to the Roman period, which flattered local susceptibility and granted certain localities a past regarded as original. Antiquarians and scholars collected and studied the antiquities, but without any systematic order and without seeing in them a possible source of original information. The situation was to change very slowly during the course of the eighteenth century, with some attention paid to written epigraphic and numismatic archaeological documents.

Switzerland waited until well into the nineteenth century to discover its own archaeology and in this respect was far from having a leading role in the development of European archaeology. Switzerland did not participate in the debates about the rediscovery of the Gauls during the French Revolution, nor in the debate around the undermining of biblical chronology through the combined efforts of paleontology and uniformitarian geology. There was nothing in Switzerland that could compare to the confrontations about the existence of primitive man, to the invention of the three-age system by the Scandinavian antiquarians, or to the first differentiation of lithic industries by French archaeologists and paleontologists. On the contrary, the first archaeological work in Switzerland, during the 1830s, was to come from men who had discovered this new discipline while living abroad.

Once inaugurated in Switzerland, however, archaeology developed rapidly. Indeed, having been spared the difficult debate about the origins of man, the Swiss began archaeological research when its doors had already been opened and the necessary conceptual framework had already been established, even if still disputed. Moreover, the very progressive political context in Switzerland at the time enabled much research to be discussed in a dispassionate atmosphere, which scholars in other countries could not hope to experience. Hence, perhaps, the pragmatic nature, rarely explicitly theoretical, of the majority of these archaeological studies.

It was only with some difficulty that the early Swiss archaeologists could be distinguished from the antiquarians of past centuries, but, eventually, they were led by exceptional characters such as ferdinand keller, frederic troyon, and edouard desor, undoubtedly charismatic men who managed to consolidate the specific abilities of each individual. In Switzerland, archaeological research showed an exceptional dynamism, uniting distinguished geologists and naturalists, learned collectors,