ARCHAEOLOGICAL SURVEYS IN JURA MOUNTAIN WOODLANDS: METHODOLOGY AND FIRST RESULTS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2020-10-16

Jura mountains are characterized by a landscape of plateaux and high valleys between 600 and 1700 m high, on the French/Swiss border. This region is nowadays mainly covered by pastures and wooded areas. Facing the lack of archaeological data on Jura high chain, a survey program has been launched on this area since 2015 by Chrono-Environnement Laboratory. This program is based upon the analysis of LiDAR data and seeks to bring chronological data about the spotted archaeological structures, often located in mountain spruce forests. We will present in this paper the main difficulties encountered with this vegetation cover, the different approaches that were used, and finally some of the first results of the program. For the moment, apart from several roman itineraries and protohistorical or early medieval fortified sites, the main results are concerning the numerous remains of medieval and modern forest exploitation (such as tar kilns, chalk furnaces and charcoal-making platforms) and pastoral activities (modern deserted hamlets and dairy huts, drystone field boundaries), that were never studied or surveyed before. Military structures linked to the 19th and 20th century wars also appear to be very common in this border area. Several field approaches have been tried to characterize as well as possible these different types of sites, from pedestrial surveys to test pits. While pedestrial and geophysical surveys are quickly limited because of vegetation cover, the use of metal detectors appears to be really useful on some selected areas, as well as small test pits and drillings followed by 14C dating. A GIS approach bring about sites distribution and land-use evolution some first results that may then be compared to several paleoenvironmental analyses.

Author(s): Chevassu, Valentin - Bichet, Vincent - Richard, Hervé - Thivet, Matthieu (UMR 6249 Chrono-Environnement / Universite de
Bourgogne-Franche-Comte)