Publisher's Synopsis
This book is about 'The East Brittany Survey', a project designed to investigate changing land-use, and its relationship to settlement pattern, in the Morbihan in eastern Brittany, during the last two millennia. Its primary concern is with people's relationship with the land in a northern European cereal-growing economy, and the way this has changed over time. It is equally about appropriate methodologies for archaeological field survey, since the project was as much concerned with establishing a viable methodology as with the particulars of the region. The authors demonstrate that productive fieldwork can certainly be undertaken in a landscape that was well-used (rather than 'marginal' or peripheral), and undertaken with a focus on the historic period. While they have made ample use of the excellent supply of written source material, from the early middle ages to the 20th century (including a good corpus of localizable material relating to land-use in the later middle-ages and after), they have shown that a careful programme of fieldwalking, together with a judicious use of excavation and of architectural survey, can contribute plentiful new information. This throws a new perspective on the Roman period and is particularly rich on the period from the 11th to 17th centuries. This book shows us what modern field survey methods can contribute to our understanding of historic archaeology in Europe and shows how the interface between documents and landscape can be explored.
