Legacy and modernity: Archaeology of Maritime Landscape of an Atlantic shoreline
Résumé
This paper presents a recent research on the coastal maritime landscape of french Atlantic coast. This coastline is characterized by a wide intertidal zone and high tidal range. When the sea retreats, the foreshore becomes an extension of the land and a garden on the sea. The oceanic coastal societies of the past have succeeded in exploiting resources, creating port facilities and navigation techniques for their growth by seizing the coastline and adapting to changing constraints. The Land-Sea continuum has become a vast and complex maritime network with urban, port and artisanal areas interconnected with maritime routes. The chosen lab is the Bay of Bourgneuf (France). Its vast maritime complex combining anchorages, ports and inland waterways interconnected with ancient islands that have now disappeared. Its nautical space is also characterised by navigation on three scales: inland, coastal and long-distance navigations. To understand the complex maritime dynamics, we need to look at the social and environmental dynamics over the long term and take a fresh look at this ‘worked’ maritime area. As part of a vast network of North European maritime exchanges, this area between land and sea still bears the markers of these ancient activities of production and export, as well as resistance to hazards and openness to the ocean. The transformations that have taken place on the coast and in the marshes bear witness to a major dynamic and to the extensive work carried out by the local population over several centuries. While the history of this bay dates back thousands of years, a close look will be taken at the Early modern periode, during which there was a major activity linked to the sea, and whose still visible traces can be illuminated by a transdisciplinary research who combined archaeology, geoarchaeology and history approach. The aim is to (re)discover a part of the maritime past of a multi-faceted coastline that has evolved into an archaeological reservoir of human practices and their interactions with the ocean. From ‘worked’ to ‘inherited’ territory, the Baie de Bourgneuf is a fascinating case in point.
