L'habitat des élites romaines dans les suburbia d'Aquitaine méridionale : approches géographiques et morphologiques

Abstract

How can suburban areas be defined? Is it possible to identify a typical model? Is there a set of markers that are sufficiently relevant to attempt to systematise the process of identification in the various provinces of the Roman Empire? Were there settlements of a particular nature and/or form in these areas? These are not new questions. They have all been tackled in their own way by numerous researchers over the last fifteen or twenty years. The research method is always the same: start with the Latin authors and their view of the environs of Rome and/or Italy's most important conurbations, and try to find enough points of comparison with the archaeological data available on known cities to fit this ‘model’ - or at least to approach a certain definition of these famous suburbia.

This is never a simple exercise, since most of today's towns and cities cover most of these ancient suburban areas. However, the development of preventive archaeology has enabled us to revisit our understanding of the situation, and here and there - through small windows - we have been able to provide some very pertinent answers, indicating that the urban, suburban and rural areas existed side by side very closely, if not via extremely permeable interfaces. This is probably even truer for southern Aquitaine / Novempopulania, where the towns we know today are characterised by very small spatial areas that were largely open to the countryside, as well as by infrastructures that some antiquarians would find hard to define as specific to the urban world. To date, research into suburban areas remains largely unprecedented in southern Aquitaine. We therefore humbly propose to take the first steps by approaching this problem from the combined angle of geomatics and the architecture of uillae suburbanae. We will be using an as yet largely unpublished dataset, drawn from our respective theses as well as from the national Patriarche database. The aim is to identify a set of markers and convincing criteria to help define these very special and changing spaces.