1This issue of Archéopages will no doubt appeal to readers whose country roots are still close – I dare not say written in the genes – so much so, as Henri Breuil wrote straight after World War II, that “we have only just severed the cords that bound us to the Neolithic”.

2Rurality, rural: “pertaining to life in the countryside, concerning countrymen” says the dictionary. Without going as far as placing, in Alphonse Allais’ words, “towns in the countryside” (though there are of course new towns created ex nihilo)… the authors of this issue will challenge our conceptions of the countryside. Recent discoveries have shed new light on this rural world, which is becoming better known thanks to thousands of hectares investigated in mitigation archaeology, and in areas research excavations would not have touched, for want of a research agenda or financial support.

3Though the rural people themselves are not discussed directly here – there are no cemetery analyses for example – they are present everywhere in these pages, through the prism of their settlements, their cultural practices or heir storage techniques.

4Underlying several contributions is the question of the status of the owners of the large Roman estates found all over France, some of which, like at Saint-Rémy-de Provence, are still being excavated. The question is obviously not new but the results show how much progress can be made through the accumulation of data from successive discoveries. Incidentally, theses advance in knowledge constitute an argument against those who, not without ulterior motives, ask whether it is still worth excavating a Gallo-Roman villa, or a series of Iron Age burials or early medieval storage pits.

5I do not mention these last periods without purpose, as they are, in my opinion, the periods which have most benefitted from the input of mitigation archaeology, especially in aspects concerning their “rurality”. The reality and complexity of their often fleeting remains can only be apprehended through large scale archaeological investigations using appropriate means. Our understanding of the landscape and settlement of rural Gaul has been completely overhauled, as shown by the exhibition jointly organised by Inrap and the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, “Gaulois, un exposition renversante (“The Gauls, a mind-blowing exhibition”). Those little-known, even unknown, Early Middle Ages, overshadowed by the splendours of Roman Gaul and by the castles and towns of the Middle Ages on either side, are finally coming into the limelight, with a population that is adopting active, ingenious and even aggressive strategies to develop the land, far from the cliché so many generations of schoolchildren have been subjected to. It portrayed “lazy kings”, travelling in rudimentary ox-drawn carts on improbable tracks, waiting, so the cliché goes, for a Charlemagne to arrive and put some order in what, for want of precise and objective data, looked like a “Dark Age”, characterised by a return to a “primitive” lifestyle.

6Let us also note that, thanks to large-scale open area excavations as well as evaluation exercises, huge tracts of the national landscape have been examined by archaeologists who, to use Philippe Leveau’s expression, have perfected an “archaeology of ditches” and scrutinised their contents using specialists in geology and the environment (specialists in fruits and seeds, pollen, charcoal etc.). Their work allows us to better apprehend the occupation of the landscape, its agricultural exploitation and “domestication” by people who left traces for us to elucidate. Let us recall what he geographer Georges Bertrand wrote in the preface of his 1991 Pour une Archéologie agraire (Towards an agrarian archaeology): “the landscape is also an archaeological artefact”. This message is however sometime difficult to convey, given that so many still think of archaeology solely in terms of monuments and objects.

7Among the lucky circumstances of mitigation archaeology, and confirmation of the unforeseeable character of discoveries that the current state of knowledge would not have let us expect, is the research conducted on the allegorical representation of peasantry in the USSR: it is based on the low reliefs of the Soviet pavilion built on the occasion of the International Exhibition of 1937 in Paris and uncovered in the ice-house of a seventeenth-century castle at Baillet-en-France in the Val-d’Oise.

Agrarian traces observed during the diagnostic carried out by Ph. Mellinand (Inrap) in Les Baux de Provence in early 2012.

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They correspond to a Roman vineyard extending over several hectares. Their precise dating is not known, but they are located 250 m from a small agricultural settlement, also observed during the same diagnostic, occupied between the 1^st and 3^rd centuries AD and covering an area of 1,500 to 2,000 m².

Photo : R. Denis, Inrap.