Le temps court en archéologie

Résumé 0

Mastering time is a core task in archaeology, but methods able to measure the temporal dimension at high resolution are rather rare. Through its ability to date archaeological structures and their context directly, dendrochronology has created a revolution in the field. Especially for research on lake dwellers, systematic tree-ring investigations of large samples give us the opportunity to follow settlement development, by dating construction sequences. Dating their successive repairs also allows a better appreciation of the duration of structures and the dynamics of growth or decline of settlements over generations.Dendroarchaeology is also well suited for technological and paleoenvironmental questions requiring high chronological precision –for example understanding the earliest forms of woodland management through dendrotypology, and climatic reconstructions allowing a better understanding of demographic and socio-economic changes in land use and food production, and finally ecological considerations, such as the reproductive cycle of cockchafer populations and their recurring damage to plantations and forests. With this wide range of applications and its suitability for multi-scalar approaches to time, dendroarchaeology offers many possibilities for improving our interpretation of settlement development relative to climatic variations, socio-economic strategies, and potential for land use. High-resolution chronologies provided by tree-ring analyses are crucial in archaeology, as they help us identify and appreciate continuities and discontinuities in history.