Connecting Gien Castle to its Landscape: Faunal, Environmental and Buildings Analyses (Loiret, France)

ABSTRACT

Gien castle is a listed monument of French architectural heritage. Today it houses the National Museum of Hunting and its collection. Organised visits to the site have traditionally lacked any clear mention of the castle’s historical background. Recently, however, archaeological excavations and building analysis in 2011–2015 produced a wealth of new knowledge about the castle’s medieval origins and history, and about its relationship to its landscape. During the ninth and tenth centuries and then in the fifteenth century the castle occupied a strategically exceptional position reflecting the connection with its environment, notably the strong connection between the castle settlement and the River Loire. These new readings of Gien’s past landscapes diverge from the present-day identity of the castle as the ‘National Museum of Hunting’, and new connections need to be made.

KEYWORDS:

• Castle and town
• early and late middle age
• River Loire
• landscape resources
• cultural management

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express their profound gratitude to Pierre Mège for their invaluable assistance in managing the preparation of this manuscript. We would also like to thank those institutions and researchers that answered our request to complete the cartography of the ninth and tenth century settlements of the Loire Valley (Figure 2): ARTEHIS-Dijon, CEM Auxerre/ARTEHIS-Dijon, DRAC-SRA - Centre-Val de Loire, INRAP - Centre-Val de Loire.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Mélinda Bizri is an archaeologist exploring spatial organisation and the structuring of medieval sites through power relations in medieval and modern society. She is a member of the research laboratory ‘Archéologie, Terre, Histoire et Sociétés’ (ARTEHIS UMR 6298) supported by CNRS, the Université de Bourgogne and the Ministère de la Culture. https://artehis.u-bourgogne.fr/

Gaëtan Jouanin is a zooarchaeologist studying and interpreting animal remains found in situ to analyse their interaction with their surroundings, other animals or human beings. He is a member of the CNRS research laboratory AASPE, Archéozoologie - Archéobotanique. Sociétés, pratiques et environnements (https://archeozoo-archeobota.mnhn.fr/fr) and of the Centre de Recherche Archéologique de la Vallée de l’Oise; https://cravo.org/. [email protected]

Quentin Borderie is a researcher in geoarchaeology, and works on cultural layers in Western Europe and on archaeological site formation processes in particular using soil micromorphology, phytolith analysis and geochemistry. He is a member of CNRS-UMR 7041 ‘Archéologies Environnementales’ He has published “Dark Earth in the Geoarchaeological Approach to Urban Contexts” (CNRS 2014) and “Early Middle Ages Houses of Gien (France) from the Inside: Geoarchaeology and Archaeobotany of 9th–11th c. Floors” (Environmental Archaeology 2018).

Christophe Perrault is a dendrochronologist. He is Director of CEDRE, the Centre d'Études en Dendrochronologie et de Recherche en Écologie et paléoécologie, Besançon (France), a company oriented towards dendrochronology analysis and dating methods for houseolders, archaeologists, architects or researchers. http://dendro-cedre.fr; [email protected]

Sabrina Save is a specialist in geochemistry and the impact of human activities on soil chemistry at the landscape level. She is the scientific director of Amélie (Études Environnementales et Archéologiques), a private laboratory dedicated to palaeo-environmental and archaeometric studies, http://ameliefrance.com/. [email protected]

Alys Vaughan-Williams is an independent archaeobotanist working with Amélie (Études Environnementales et Archéologiques) (http://ameliefrance.com/). She has more than 20 years of experience in the study of plant macro-remains from all periods both in the United Kingdom and France. (Amélie Études Environnementales et Archéologiques)