Suchergebnisse

Economic and Spatial Organization of a Prehistoric Peasant Community: the Group of Fontbouisse in Bas-Languedoc.

The Chalcolithic is a period in the prehistory of agrarian societies which is caracterized in the Bas-Languedoc by the development of highly organized peasant communities: the group of Fontbouisse which builts villages whose houses have dried-mud stone walls. These concentrated settlements are located according to an elaborated economic system based on grain cultivation and rational management of a mixt stock-breeding. Through the investigation of the sites it becomes possible to understand the economic and thus the spatial logic of this peasant community; the author tries to demonstrate its social cohesion by pointing out the existence of a basic cell, i.e. the village unit. He shows that the origins of ager, saltus and syloa can be found in the ways the exploited areas are distributed. He insulates them in each type of villages, the parameters of which he defines after having studied about 200 of them (20 to 25 units /100 km2). This paper sets the premisses of a broader analysis on spatial organizations of the modes of prehistoric production (village unit, production unit, sedentariness, spatial cell of economic development).