Murol is a small village of six hundred inhabitants located in a little valley in Puy de Dôme, in the Massif Central. Since the ‘90s the municipality has been focused on the development of tourism, taking advantage of its important natural, historical and cultural heritage. Situated on a hill that dominates the city, an imposing medieval castle (XII – XVI century) is one of the most important touristic spots in all of Auvergne.
However, in spite of the rich presence of monuments in Auvergne, few studies have been carried out so far, most focus on famous sites like Gergovie or Lezoux, whilst most of the regional cultural heritage is unrecognized. This ignorance about local history leads to a lot of approximations and mistakes in general knowledge, and in communication with tourists and locals. Furthermore, several spots are nowadays managed by private companies, caring more about profit than historical facts, often transforming reality to be more attractive and lucrative. On the other hand, the real interest by locals in their culture and history has become the main driving force for the development of historical research and tourism over the last twenty years.
With this goal, in 2008, Murol’s municipality decided to collaborate with an archaeological team to investigate its monuments and archaeological heritage with the purpose of rebuilding territorial identity through the promotion and conservation of the cultural heritage in an accurate historical perspective. Since then, a team directed by Dominique Allios (professor in medieval archaeology at Rennes 2 University) has been going there every summer to carry out archaeological fieldwork and research. I am going to present the characteristics of this mission; the objectives of the research and some of the main results.
Before the work of the Equipe Archéologique de Murol (EAM), only two archaeologists had investigated Murol back in the XX century, mostly paying attention to the Roman history. They excavated several sites and parts of their discoveries were stored in the village’s museum. Moreover, the historian Jean Pierre Charbonnier studied Medieval times, retracing the history of the ancient fiefdom. The new archaeological operations have built on these previous works, going in three different directions:
- Research and new analyses on the previously excavated material;
- Understanding the life of the castle, from its construction until today;
- Identification of new sites though survey missions.
The purpose of these three main activities has been to determine the archaeological potential of the municipal territory. Survey missions have shown how consistent the archaeological potential of the region is: before 2008, there were less than 10 registered sites in the study area (15.5 km²), taking into account the castle and other big monuments. There are now more than 70 recorded sites, from Neolithic to Modern times; such as Neolithic chest graves and stone-pits, abandoned villages (still undated), protohistoric villages and fortifications, antique sites (roads, high mountains shelters, agglomerations, temples, villas), medieval villages, transhumance structures and medieval troglodytic installations (caves, castle, barns, habitations). It appeared that the region has been included in a larger network for ages, and this network kept changing over time.
Nevertheless, in order to better understand these changes, it became necessary to extend the context in terms of space and time, and to study Murol’s history at different levels, from the local, to the regional one, the national and eventually the international.
The team adopted then a more comprehensive approach involving several research fields: history, history of art, archaeology, landscape archaeology, archaeological sciences, geography, anthropology, zooarchaeology, geology, and ethnology.
To illustrate this approach we can take the castle as an example. Located in the centre of the valley, it played a major role in the organization of the communal territory from its construction. Today, the village is located far from it, in the bottom of the valley, but during medieval times when the castle was the seat of a powerful domain, the village was settled on the slopes of the monument, inside fortified walls. It was also demonstrated that the distribution of construction in the valley developed following the orientation of the castle itself. During antiquity, the bottom of the valley was almost completely empty, and the occupied areas were located on the plateaus surrounding the valley, close to imperial roads connecting Clermont-Ferrand to southern France by crossing the Massif Central. However, during medieval times, occupations moved along the slopes of the valley, in a visual relationship with the castle, the centre of a complex visual communication network, granting the lord complete control of the region. Different sites (villages, small castles) have a view of both the castle and the adjoining valleys in which important structures are found, such as the famous church of Saint Nectaire, including them in the lord’s control network, and plateaus surrounding the valley were used as transhumance lands. Finally, when the fiefdom started to decline in the XVII century, villagers move to the bottom of the valley because communication with the castle was not necessary anymore. However, transhumance continued from medieval time to current days, and the mountains are still used in this way by local farmers.
This example clearly shows that the landscape is evolving continuously through historical periods. In order to understand the actual implantation of the village, it is necessary to understand the spatial organization of the valley at a larger scale. Moreover, because of the deep entanglement of all the components, a clear understanding of how things have evolved until the current situation is impossible without a comprehensive approach. This approach is not possible to apply in every archaeological or historical research project because it requires working for a long time on the same subject. In this case, since the main goal was the re-appropriation of the local history for locals and tourists, this conception of archaeological and historical research was necessary.
On the same register, it appears it was crucial to have a more detailed approach to recent phases and periods. Auvergne is and has always been an important region for transhumant cow breeding, famous meat (especially Salers cows), and cheese production (Saint Nectaire, Cantal). Historical sources showed that transhumance has played a central role in this region since medieval times, and mentions of Saint Nectaire exist in XVII century manuscripts. Mountains were considered a precious pasture resource for herds and their management was clearly oriented to this purpose. This led to the installation of several infrastructures for cow breeding and cheese production that have worked from the end of medieval times until contemporary times. Transhumance, use of caves to process Saint Nectaire, high mountain roads used for herd movements, summer pilgrimage celebrating the beginning of the transhumance can be mentioned as examples of the continuity of practices that crossed centuries, today an important part of local culture and identity.
However, if traditional practices were still common in the first half of the XX century, they are now dying because they are not competitive enough to face intensive cow breeding and industrial cheese production. Moreover, rural exodus is getting more and more massive and it leads to a lack of available workforce. This situation, very common in rural parts of France, is slowly devastating rural identity and culture and nothing seems to stop or inverse this tendency, quite the reverse.
In this context and as witnesses of changes, historians, scientists and archaeologists have a role to play, in order to register and analyse these changes. One of the goals of an historical project is to grant habitants re-appropriation of their cultural heritage; it appears that the study of traditional technics and their evolution is an absolute priority. For this purpose, local producers who are still using traditional ways of cow breeding helped the researchers to register traditions and activities, showing that, even though things evolved between medieval times and current times, there is a very impressive coherency and continuity in most of those practices. Testimonies of former farmers helped to analyse and understand the organisation of medieval and modern transhumance, the production technics, and the use of infrastructure. This “ethnological” part of the research is also useful because is registering habits and costumes that are slowly disappearing.
The situation described here is not an isolated case and it does not only refer to the current French situation. For several decades, we have been living a very important moment of evolution, changes and transformations of our world on many planes (agriculture practices, use of natural resources, increasing globalisation and worldwide communication, intensive urbanisation and abandon of the rural world among others). Some things are going to change and evolve, others are going to appear and some are disappearing, as it is with rural practices in Auvergne. As scientists, we are privileged witnesses of these transformations, and our role is to record it and to make this knowledge public. Not because of an “old time nostalgia”, but because if we are not doing this, a lot of things are going to die, slowly and silently.
This article was written by Louis Arbez a Master’s student in the Museum’s “Quartenary and Prehistory” specialization.
Muséum national d'histoire naturelle 