Recent researches in Archaeogeography take the same path as some innovative thoughts in Archaeology, such as those proposed in this symposium on contemporary Archaeology. Indeed, they have shown that it is impossible to offer a faithful...
moreRecent researches in Archaeogeography take the same path as some innovative thoughts in Archaeology, such as those proposed in this symposium on contemporary Archaeology. Indeed, they have shown that it is impossible to offer a faithful reconstruction of ancient morphological networks (networks of roads, of plots of land and of habitats) despite the increasing accumulation of archaeological data. That’s why, one studies less what things were, because that goal seems increasingly difficult to achieve, than what things have become. Before hope to achieve eventually one particular old object in its form and its historical functions, we must spend more and more time to study the conditions of its transmission to us, in the long term. However, these transmissions are neither linear nor simple but deeply complex and dynamics: we speak to characterize this phenomenon about "transformission" (transmission despite and through transformations). At the heart of this new way in approaching the question of the sustainability of landscapes, there is the concept of resilience, borrowed from geographers. So, Archaeogeography is the discipline that studies the memory of the forms of landscapes because they are memory objects that are transmitted as they are transformed in the time-space, as well as archaeological data speak about what they are in present because they are not the faithful witnesses of the past.
This revolution in the ways of thinking about inherited spatial forms requires to do otherwise:
- the need to take into account the contemporary states and to break down barriers between academic periods;
- the need to go through a long process of sorting through heritages before expecting any reconstitution;
- the need to exceed the level of modeling (the object of the study of archaeologists) to work on the form;
- the need to exit the limits of the excavations and to implement a methodology based on multi-scale approach.
We can read behind the various renouncements to the illusions of Archaeology but also to the implicit or explicit precepts of classical Historical Geography. This also brings to question the main epistemological biases imposed by it: nationalism, methodological naturalism and historicism.
It is, paradoxically, the massive influx of sediment data in the context of preventive Archaeology that produced this major epistemological reversal in the study of forms of landscapes around the 2000s. If the claims of Archaeology to talk about territories are thereby lowered, it does not mean losing as critical reflection on archaeological documentation sketch at the same time the wealth of potential collaborations when they done well, that is to say in full awareness of the limitations and strengths of the different disciplines useful to understand the spatial objects of past societies (Archaeology, Archaeogeography, History, palaeoenvironmental sciences). The archaeogeographical assessment can thus be valuable to archaeologists before their excavations because it helps to assess the archaeological potential of an area in order to, sometimes, anticipate the discovery of some structures and to document the history of a particular place. After the excavations, the archaeogeographical assessment allows them also to offer a synthesis of hypotheses on the evolution of planimetric forms and landscapes, so on a different scale.
We propose to recall this epistemological and methodological history by presenting a short historiography of geohistorical disciplines and by taking a few heuristics examples because they allowed for fifteen years to renovate the history of forms (Roman centuriation, bocage, networks of roads, medieval forms).
Finally, this reversal of perspective on old and inherited geographical objects opens a fertile reflection about contemporary facilities with new proposals concerning the relationship between Past and Present. Indeed, we know how the occultation of the history and geography of such-and-such area can lead to deadlocks because our societies have lost the memory of potentiality, of opportunities and risks. However, the archaeogeographical analysis participates in the reconsideration of places and of their history by emphasizing the interactions between people and their environments on combinations of time scales that refuse to choose between a single short time Contemporary and a monotone long-term without content. Archaeogeographical analysis thus provides key reading for understanding our current and future societies by offering mediation and decision support to various stakeholders, including, first and foremost, developers whose projects have a strong impact on the territories. It can thus provides a historical perspective to the current policies of spatial planning and landscape management, at least in those oriented towards sustainability of their actions and the anticipation of risks. Second, it is useful to communities to manage their heritages and territories and to help citizen in development projects. We will present some works that showed how an analysis of the dynamic forms could provide information on current issues seemingly unrelated to the past heritage but in reality profoundly affected by inheritance.
