Grandson

Geschichte

Grandson is a municipality in the district of Jura-Nord Vaudois in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland.During the Burgundian Wars, Charles the Bold was defeated near here in the Battle of Grandson on 2 March 1476.HistoryThe Grandson family is first mentioned in the second half of the 11th Century as Grancione. The town was first mentioned around 1100 as de castro Grancione. Around 1126 it was mentioned as castri Grandissoni and in 1154 it was called apud Grantionem.Prehistoric settlementsIn May 1895 a farmer discovered a buried underground menhir weighing about three tons and about 3.4m tall in Les Echâtelards. The monolith now stands in the vicinity of the discovery site. Grandson, however, is better known for its prehistoric lakeside settlements. The site at Corcelettes became well known after 1854, when Frederic Louis Troyon introduced the author Ferdinand Keller to the Corcelettes site in which numerous piles for stilt houses—as well as vases—were found. By 1930, seven lake front settlements were identified. They included: in Corcelettes a large Bronze Age site and a smaller one from the Neolithic period, in Les Buttes two more from the Neolithic period, and in Le Repuis, Le Stand and Les Tuileries three others that were probably from the Neolithic period. At the last three sites, no artifacts were discovered that could be used to definitively date them. In 1995 at the Bellerive campsite, a Late Neolithic settlement dating from 2741-2488 BC was discovered.