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Chapitre d'ouvrage Année : 2016

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.
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halshs-02321091, version 1 (20-10-2019)

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  • HAL Id : halshs-02321091 , version 1

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Elisabeth Zadora-Rio. Parish boundaries and the illusion of territorial continuity in landscape archaeology : the evidence from Touraine. Tomás Ó Carragáin; Sam Turner. Making Christian Landscapes in Atlantic Europe. Conversion and Consolidation in the early Middle Ages, Cork University Press, pp.345-365, 2016, 978-1-78205-200-5. ⟨halshs-02321091⟩
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