Mediaeval building in the Centre region (France) : the exploitation of building stone and construction techniques in the Centre region from the 12th to the 16th century : the archaeological evidence from developer funded interventions ; Construire au Moyen-Age en région Centre : économie de la pierre et techniques de construction en région Centre du XIIe au XVIe siècle : l'apport des chantiers d'archéologie préventive

Abstract

This thesis may be considered from two angles: that of a retrospective look at the professional framework and the practices of buildings archaeology within the sphere of architectural heritage management and that of an appraisal of the archaeological data gathered during field work in this particular context. Before being considered as "heritage", standing buildings of any form are archaeological remains. The first part of this work examines the legal and institutional framework which conditions just how and when archaeologists may get to study and record these remains in a context where the legislation concerning the protection and management of the architectural heritage is juxtaposed rather than integrated with that governing archaeological research. Within this framework, archaeological field work usually has to satisfy the needs of the institutions responsible for the management and restoration of architectural heritage. In so doing, it also produces considerable amounts of "secondary" data which are rarely published or even used, despite their potential interest for archaeological research on the history of building. The second part of this thesis consists of a critique of the archaeological methods used during the field work and its' effects on the quality and the quantity of the data produced. It was thus possible to make a thematic assessment of the state of archaeological research in the Centre region over the last two decades and to draw up a corpus of sites which form the basis for the third part of the thesis. This corpus consists of forty-one buildings of various types which have been directly studied by the author during archaeological field work. They cover the period from the middle of the 11th century to the start of the 17th century. Another thirty-nine buildings situated in the Berry in the southern part of the region were also selected as comparative sites. This rather heterogeneous sample offered the advantage of not being bound by the usual typological categories. By comparing very ...