ABSTRACT
The battlefield of Alesia is one of the most famous and best documented of classical Antiquity. The text, as said, has its own ambiguities, but its content is naturally an essential factor in understanding the battlefield. A battlefield, where tens or even hundreds of thousands of men were engaged obviously consists of more than just remains of constructions. Alesia is at one and the same time the site of a siege and the place of a battle. Standing as a sort of sacred account, a Bible as it were, that was long above criticism, anything that is extraneous to the text and that fails to fit in with the doxa it lays down proves, for some, that Alesia could not have been there where it is has been located. The archaeological research has related primarily to the Roman siege works. The 19th-century archaeological digs of the Second Empire purported to identify a series of camps around the oppidum.
