Parish boundaries and the illusion of territorial continuity in landscape archaeology : the evidence from Touraine
Résumé
Building on a recent study of the development of parish territories in the
Touraine, France, over the longue durée, from their origins to their
incorporation into post-revolutionary administrative structures, this chapter
discusses the process of parochialisation in relation to local conceptualisations
of space, and its effect on boundary definitions. The assumption
that parish territories were adapted to fit the boundaries of earlier
landholding units and that these boundaries represent the oldest and most
permanent features in the landscape, has a long historiographical
tradition. This view was reinforced by the development of archaeological
excavations and surveys from the 1970s onwards, which revealed the great
age of certain field systems, ditches and banks that dated back to Antiquity
or prehistory, and in some cases retained their boundary role to the present
day. Parish boundaries became a central research issue for landscape
archaeologists, yet the main emphasis of these studies was not on the
parochial territories themselves, but on the earlier estates that had
allegedly determined their shape. Consequently, very little attention was
paid to the processes of parish formation and to the social mechanisms
that might account for such boundary preservation. This chapter argues
that, far from being a static framework which local communities inherited
from a remote past, parish territories were circumscribed by a complex
web of overlapping boundaries, which were constantly manipulated and
adapted to accommodate contemporary strategies. The incorporation of
some stretches of older banks or ditches or other ancient landscape
features into parish boundaries should be understood, not as the result of
static territorial continuity, but of dynamic recycling.
Origine :
Accord explicite pour ce dépôt
Loading...