In 1924 the first of a long series of astounding archaeological finds was made by a young farmer in a little hamlet near Vichy in France. By the 30s the suspicion of most archaeologists had hardened into the certainty that Glozel was the scene of a colossal fraud: the finds were all modern fakes. In 1974 two physicists ran tests on a few objects from the site, using a new method for dating pottery by means of glow measurements on heated samples. They amazed the archaeologists by coming up with ages of about two and a half thousand years. Since then, as tonight's Chronicle reports, the physicists and archaeologists have been uneasily ranged against each other in controversy.