De la fouille des villages abandonnés à l'archéologie des territoires locaux. L'étude des systèmes d'habitat du haut Moyen Age en France méridionale (Ve-Xe siècle) : nouveaux matériaux, nouvelles interrogations

摘要

Since the founding excavation of the deserted village of Rougiers in Provence, medieval archaeological research concerning the transformation of both settlements as entities and settlement patterns has never ceased evolving and new territories have been explored. The aim of this paper is to lay out the newest research in this field for the South of France by looking at the problems raised by the occupation of roman villae after the 5th century, by exploring the progressive territorialization of rural settlements during the early Middle Ages and by studying the appearance in the years 450 to 550 of numerous hill-top and fortified villages, absent in the written sources. Instead of the typological forms adopted by rural settlements often studied in and of themselves, the advancement of medieval archaeology incites researchers to untangle the skein of medieval socio-spacial connections and question the relationship between the men and the spaces they lived in, from the sites to the region as a whole. In this, the archaeology of local areas explores the legacies and the dynamics of the settlements which, in the long run, became the historical basis of the small territories created around a castle, a church, or a village, and which lead to the current network of 36 683 «communes», a French administrative specificity which never fails to surprise in the modern european landscape.