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Abstract :
[en] This paper aims to bring new knowledge on a subalpine territory in the Southern Alps in the long term, specifically since the Middle Ages. The Roya’s small valley is a little territory located between 1400 and 2800 m in the Mercantour massif.
Timber is widely used in agropastoral buildings. Many witnesses are still preserved in this valley. Therefore, the main approaches are dendrochronology and archaeology. Cartographic sources and written records were also used.
The main question is the chronology of subalpine constructions, mainly agropastoral barns but also houses. The question of construction practices is also at the heart of this research. The third question raised by this study is relations between human populations and forests.
The corpus is constituted by 18 buildings and 120 dendrochronological dates. The results first deliver a long tree-rings chronology from the end of 10th century to early 20th century. Dendrochronological records give evidence of an elevated frame of which the oldest still preserved witnesses are dated from the 13th century. The second result reveals construction practices based on the systematic reuse of timber over a long period. Moreover, this approach reflects a dynamism in the agropastoral construction of the subalpine floor. The third result informs that if one sees the difference in the exploitation of forests according to the different areas of the valley, one sees a gradual decrease in the age of the trees slaughtered over time (13th – 20th century).
The study also provides results on the mobility of raw materials for buildings. In the 14th century, timber was transferred from one building to another. Dendrochronology also helps to to perceive different forest terroirs within the same building. This dendro-archaeological reading of the subalpine construction makes it possible to question the origin of raw materials on a mountain territory at a micro-scale.
