Shepherds, flocks and pastures: archaeo-history of pastoralism in a Basque village (French Pyrenees)
Résumé
The shepherd's huts excavated west of the Pyrenees have yielded too little fauna for further analysis of livestock mobility; only petrography has shown, for the Bronze Age, varied patterns of mobility (P. Dumontier and F. Convertini). Beyond the great Pyrenean transhumance circuits traced by geographers at the beginning of the 20th century, we have direct written and planimetric evidence for recent periods, mainly from the contemporary period, for summering at shorter distances. From the Napoleonic cadastre, or from rental leases, we have traced the links between huts and villages, between huts and houses, for the mountainous part of the Basque Country, in Soule and in Cize. Put in series, in space and in graphs, these sources inform us of the sharing, access, paths and possessions in the mountains. Also, from the Middle Ages onwards, neighborhood agreements inform of spaces in compascuity, common to several communities of neighbors in different ways. This raises the question of their spatialization according to toponyms that disappear, move or are deformed through time.