When the Commission de Topographie des Gaules (CTG) was dissolved in 1879 some of its work remained incomplete. Of the three dictionaries which had been intended to accompany its maps, just one had been published, and was not entirely finished. However, the scientific documents gathered by the CTG were used by other scholars who continued its work.
Émile Cartailhac and the continuation of the dictionary
The Commission de géographie historique de l'ancienne France, the institution which replaced the CTG in 1880, decided to end the Celtic dictionary at the letter G. The writing of two other dictionaries focused on the Gallo-Roman and Merovingian periods was abandoned.
In 1894, Émile Cartailhac, a prehistorian from Toulouse, volunteered to correct, complete and write entries for the Dictionnaire archéologique de la Gaule – Époque celtique. In June 1895, Salomon Reinach gave him some of the working documents collected by the CTG and conserved at the musée d'Archéologie nationale. This colossal amount of work, which was unpaid, came to an end in 1919, when the three new volumes covering the letters G to L were published.
Completion of the dictionary and other publications
Émile Cartailhac died in 1921. Under the scientific supervision of three experts in French archaeology, Salomon Reinach, Camille Jullian and Émile Esperandieu, the dictionary was finally completed in 1924. Other scholars made use of the abundance of documents gathered by the CTG. In 1885, the archivist Auguste Longnon completed his Atlas historique de la France depuis César jusqu'à nos jours. In 1892, the numismatist Henri de la Tour published the Atlas des monnaies gauloises, completing a general catalogue of Gallic coins begun by the CTG.
