This is the journal of reference for medieval archaeology in France, edited since its foundation forty years ago by Michel de Boöard at the University of Caen/Lower Normandy, where he also founded (in 1955-56) the medieval archaeology research center that today bears his name. Like its older cousin Medieval Archaeology in England (founded in 1956) Archéologie Médiévale offers articles regarding current research, a summary of medieval excavations conducted in France over the previous year, and book reviews. In this issue C. Blondeau studies how limestone blocks were extracted during the tenth and eleventh centuries from a quarry located at Nucourt, in the Val d'Oise, north of Paris. Another technical study, by D. Arribet- Deroin, mines the accounting records of two late-medieval English forges (Tudeley, in Kent, from 1329-1354 and Byrkeknott, in County Durham, in 1408-1409), one manually and one hydraulically powered, to compare workshop techniques and production.
Two articles are concerned with the interpretation of an artefact series, in both cases very early medieval (happily for this reviewer). L. Van Wersch. G. Van Geesbergen and O. Vrielynck review a corpus of 26 glass cups whose bottoms display Christian motifs. To traditional typological, iconographical and contextual criteria new dimensions are added by the analysis of their chemical composition, and comparisons with other series recently studied in England and the south of France. Their rather tight chronological range (last quarter of the fifth/earlier sixth century), chemical homogeneity and likely fabrication from raw glass imported in bulk from the eastern Mediterranean strengthens the case for the persistence of Late Roman glass workshops active in the Rhine-Meuse region well into the early Merovingian era. Y. Lemoine, I. Rodet-Belarbi, S. Poignant, V. Marchaisseau and J. Goiret review the corpus of Merovingian plate buckles made of animal bone or antler, which now numbers 45, including the seven new examples discussed in detail here.
N. Poirier studies a microregion (50 square kilometers) in central France to investigate settlement dynamics and the "opportunism" of the traditional agricultural communities there over the longue durée Iron Age to early modern times. Two substantial articles discuss Italian sites. The seaside village of Noli, on the Ligurian coast, has been known as a Late Antique site since a baptistry was discovered there in the 1970s. P. De Vigno shows how salvage excavations between 2004 and 2007 confirm that a settlement was established there in late Republican times and persisted without a break into the tenth century. Since 2001 P. Racinet and G.-P. Woimet (with a team of collaborators) have been studying Terravecchia, a 20- hectare site in southeastern Sicily where an earthquake in 1693 resulted in a kind of fossilisation of the medieval castral complex and associated town. Described here are the results of a topographical study complemented by surface survey and the excavation of a late-medieval-to-early-modern residence in the bourg. The geographical range of these articles confirms the broad European perspective of the journal.
The gazetteer of medieval excavations in France during 2009 is substantial (165 pages; compare to 47 pages for Medieval Britain and Ireland), reflecting the vigor of France's national institute of preventive (salvage) archaeology (INRAP) and other public archaeologists, as well as research excavations by CNRS and University-based groups. It is organized thematically into seven categories. The first three cover structures and settlements subdivided into civil, religious and fortified; the others are: funerary, workshops, underwater sites and miscellaneous. Within each of these categories, excavations are grouped regionally. During 2010 there were 268 medieval excavations conducted within France's 23 archaeological regions (including Guyana); this compares with 128 thirty years ago. The book review section is also largely focused on France and works in French, although the short notices do include works in Italian, Spanish and English. The authors of the long reviews were clearly not subjected to space constraints; they offer (in 13 double-columned pages) an analysis that varies from detailed to exhaustive of just five books, all in French, two of them major site monographs. In 1980 the journal was published in a quarto format with illustrations of variable quality for the articles (some rather fuzzy photographs), and none at all for the gazetteer. The 2010 journal is published in a semi-folio format, allowing for two parallel columns of text on high quality glossy paper; the illustrations are both abundant (quite a few in the gazetteer as well as in the articles) and uniformly excellent, whether photographs, drawings or charts.
At forty, the mature Archéologie Médiévale exemplifies the high standards set by its founder. No serious university library should be without this essential research tool.