La topographie du haut Moyen Age à Tournai : nouvel état des questions archéologiques

Verslype, Laurent [UCL]

Over the past fifteen years, the archaeology of the higher Middle Ages in Tournai benefited from major discoveries in the districts of Saint-Brice's, Saint-Pierre's, and around Notre Dame Cathedral. They give more accuracy to the image of the antique inheritance of the capital city of the Tournai county and add material data to the royal stays in Tournai testified in the Merovingian period. Even if a high number of questions remain suspended and if some of these sites still wait for being exhaustively published, it seems seasonable to deliver a new synthesis summing up the acquisitions and giving an up-to-date archaeological landscape of the city up to the eve of the second millennium. For so doing, we also draw on the written sources likely to help us in the reading of the archaeological topography. Their scarcity and the acrid criticism to which they were subjected on the part of the historians have yet no other equal than the very special constraints of the conservation of the underground records, conditioned by the unceasing remodeling which has characterized the urban areas ever since Antiquity, and than their accessibility when they have been preserved.