INRAP and the Changing Early Medieval Landscape in France

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

When the first "modern" monograph of a Merovingian settlement site excavation, Brebieres, near Douai, was published in 1974, it re-inforced the then common impression among historians of a little-developed and unstable rural hamlets, inhabited by impoverished peasants with crude technologies—in striking contrast to the well-equipped and productive villa-centered landscapes of the Roman past. Recent decades of extensive and intensive preventive archaeology (much of it carried out since its creation in 2001 by INRAP – Institut national de recherches archeologiques preventives--) have shown this to be a much-mistaken impression, and are providing evidence that a classic medieval landscape of village clustered around castle and church-with-cemetery did not emerge rather abruptly, like "feudalism" around the year 1000, but resulted from slow and steady growth underway since at least the seventh century. This paper will draw on recent excavations, some largely unpublished, to illustrate the emerging picture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Mind the Gap: Exploring Uncharted Territories in Medieval European Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24781