Building Charlieu: Chronology and Asset Flow over Time at Saint Fortunatus Monastery, 872-1120 C.E.

Summary

The monastery of Saint Fortunatus in Charlieu, France, was built and rebuilt several times from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. In the twentieth century, the monastery was excavated by American archaeologist and art historian Elizabeth Sunderland, who relied heavily on its relationship to mega-monastery Cluny to reconstruct the smaller abbey’s chronology. However, re-examining Charlieu’s timing and phasing with attention to material and labor costs over time exposes an alternative chronology for the site. Close attention to energy costs suggests that certain construction campaigns overlapped in time and exposed opportunities for the medieval builders to use cost-saving measures (such as stockpiling, reuse, and limited demolition). Additionally, the use of architectural energetics as a research method for Charlieu allows one to examine the abbey’s chronology separately from the Abbey of Cluny, whose history and historiography exert a strong force on the smaller monastery.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Architectural Energetics

Keywords

Spatial Coverage