There are nearly 900 Gallo-Roman sanctuaries known from different types of sources (either excavated ones ¿a handful can be visited while most where covered and are no longer visible; some were discovered from aerial photography, or by different types of prospection and geo-physical methodologies). Besides, there is an important number of Gallic sanctuaries, most of them originally built in non-lasting materials and bearably undetectable on site today. These paucity of data presents a problem for Archaeoastronomical studies. On the one hand, for those where there is topographic information, or in some regional studies, the literature insists on highlighting an eastward orientation of most structures. However, and at the same time, there are also twists in orientation and skewness between the cellae and the perimeter enclosure of the Sanctuaries. It is worth indicating that there are no systematic studies on these questions. On the other hand, contemporary literary evidence indicate that druids had, among others, the function to observe celestial phenomena and keeping in shape a luni-solar calendar to, for instance, coordinate their annual meetings (Caesar 6.13.10). In this communication, we present this question and how we have tried to tackle the challenge in a practical way. We present the orientation of 79 temples (20 located in 6 oppida, 34 in 14 Gallo-Roman towns, 21 peri-urban to 11 towns and 4 outside towns). The results highlight the interest of this kind of approach to apprehend the relation with the pre-Roman Gallic religion and its materialization under the Empire when complex time-space relations are set.

Resumen del trabajo presentado en el 25th EAA Annual Meeting: Beyond paradigms, celebrado en Bern (Suiza), del 4 al 7 de septiembre de 2019