habitat rupestre.pdf - Società Friulana di Archeologia

CAVE-DWELLING ITINERARIES IN THE BAS-VENDÖMOISCRHIMA-CINP projectFig. 2 Les Roches l’Evêque, deserted cave.Fig. 3 Les Roches l’Evêque, abandoned cavity dug out at the base of the hillside.Fig. 4 Asnières, cave-dwelling on several levels.Fig. 5 Visualisation of the various strata of materials, J. Rewerski.discuss. The sandy chalk is to be found flush with the bedrockin the Bas-Vendômois.The following figures provide a visualisation of the variousstrata of materials that have stacked up over several millionyears following the flooding of the Amorican Massif by thesea. Within the framework of the European project on cavedwellings in the Mediterranean area, the first survey mademention of several of these underground cavities. While alarge number have been abandoned, others have seen a renewalof activities encouraged by local, departmental andprivate initiatives.These ancestral activities reveal a desire to maintain thememory, preserve and conserve these settings. In the Loir etCher region, most of these cavities have anthropic origins.The BRGM (geological and mining research institute) has,within the scope of a policy aiming to reduce natural risks,been given the task of listing all these cavities. This reliableinformation will make it possible to imagine a continuity oflife and a range of activities in these settings rich in memoryand tradition.It should also be noted that all these cavities are dug outat the base of the hillside and along waterways. These locationscorrespond to areas where there are sandy chalkoutcrops. The data base produced by BRGM makes a distinctionbetween anthropic cavities, being those created bymankind, and natural cavities, the latter being almost inexistentin the region. 1Anthropic cavitiesThe use of cavities as shelter goes back to the Neolithic erawhen humanity began to adopt a sedentary lifestyle. It organisedits habitat in natural sites favourable to its survival:utilisation of the land and the underground space, possibilityof protection.The profitable use of the underground environment, as inthe Clotériaux, offers new spaces. Although mankind wasessentially agricultural, it made use of the lower levels tocreate new spaces, occasionally over several levels as in Asnières,Clotériaux and the St André hillside. 2A large number of constructions were dug out from the rockin the 11th century, both for housing and chapels. Workedstone monuments only gradually appeared during this century.Consequently, the origins of a large number of troglodyticvillages were based on the industrial or craft use of themineral wealth offered by the subsurface.Quarries and the quarry worker tradeExtraction from underground quarries goes back to the timeof the Romans and continued almost up to the First WorldWar. As a result, a large number of troglodytic villages resultedfrom man’s use of stone.The quarry worker, still called the “perreyeux”, is the personwho worked in a quarry when not too busy in the fields.An underground quarry has a certain number of sub-trades,each of which requiring specialised tools. In rural France,where construction materials such as wood and stone wererare and expensive, they were almost entirely used for theconstruction of aristocratic mansions and the use of thesematerials was a source of economic development for theseregions. Limestone was used as a building material, gyp-volumeRicerca_OK_2012-11-15.indd 142 16/11/2012 15:02:31