My Home Is My Castle! Field Systems and Farms: Rhythm and Land Appropriation During the Bronze Age in North-West France (2300–800 BCE)

Abstract : With the first studies dating from the 1990s, France could be seen as being somewhat behind in its research on ancient field systems compared to other countries. Post-war agriculture of north-west France has totally obliterated ancient fossilised landscapes; levelling micro-reliefs and so erasing the smaller irregularities in the landscape such as field systems that in certain cases were laid down more than 4000 years ago. Only since the wide scale development of preventive archaeology during the last 20 years and with its more extensive excavations, has research into prehistoric field systems been possible. This has resulted in the present overview of agricultural boundaries and their chronology from the laying down of the first field systems in the third millennium BCE to their abandonment during the Late Bronze Age. Our aim is not to reconstruct ancient landscapes over large areas – as excavations rarely cover more than 5 ha at a time –but to understand how and why communities took possession of the landscape at the end of the Neolithic and how these planimetric features developed over the following thousand years. This focus is of obvious historic significance, as it targets the monopolisation and the management of the landscape and opens the way to a new reading of Bronze Age societies.