Chapitre 4. Bilan de l’apport de l’archéologie à la connaissance de Marseille médiévale et moderne

French historical and contemporary archaeology: a critical assessment

“…The size and budget of the project, and the wealth of early modern material recovered, highlighted the potential for archaeology to broaden the understanding of historical periods previously considered to be within the domain of historians and sociologists. Studies of post-medieval pottery (Horry 2012; Dieulefet et al 2014) and modern urban centres (Bouiron et al 2012; Ayala 2013) have since flourished, and INRAP has also supported excavations of many sites of more recent date, such as the remains of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century horticulturists’ houses in Montreuil (Dufour et al 2013). Until the 1990s, however, the post-nineteenth-century period remained almost entirely unexplored by archaeologists.…”