WINTERS HAVE COME AND WOODS STAYED: NEW METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH OF THE BERCÉ FOREST MASSIF
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-10-19

Bercé is a state-owned forest with an area of 5337 ha shared among eleven towns. The current vegetation is essentially made of oak-beech forest (a famous sessile oak of Iberian origin). It is mixed with ancient forest stands and modern reforestation parts whose are comprised of resinous woods.
Several studies were focused on this forest over the past few years. Thanks to the complementarity and multidisciplinarity of these studies it is possible to obtain some coherent informations concerning the evolution and the exploitation process of this forest massif. The studies of the Bercé forest are based on traditional methods mostly like the study of ancient sources and fieldwalking, but also on new technologies (LIDAR, paleoenvironmental surveys, archeometry). These different studies allowd to highlight the presence of hundreds archaeological sites dated from Protohistory to the present day. These are mostly enclosures, traces of administrative fragmentations, extractions and reductions of iron ore and old communication routes. The researches on these different sites aim to establish a chronology of occupations and help to find if some sites could be contemporaneously working together. Some scientific approaches such as archeobotanic also help to visualize a natural environment during ancient times and to identify the evolution of forest boundaries. The study of the ancient metallurgy introduces the problematic of technological evolutions over the time and of produced quantities. Studies made on the forest of Bercé constitute a first way to understand the archeological remains, and allow us to see Bercé with fresh eyes. Today a new non invasive and pluridisciplinary approach has allowed us to create a new methodology well adapted for modern forest management and archeological sites preservation.

Author(s): Choplin, Morgan (University Rennes 2)