L’habitat de la Sente à Grentheville (Calvados), vie-xe siècle, dans le contexte du terroir de Mondeville Saint-Martin

Abstract

Archaeological investigations carried out between 1992 and 1998 on the la Sente site at Grentheville, to the south-east of Caen, revealed evidence of a settlement occupied from the 6th to the early 10th century AD. It had developed on the outskirts of a presumed late-Roman settlement, within a landscape structured by land divisions originating from at least the 2nd century AD. The most significant occupation is characterised by an initial phase of twenty-odd sunken-featured buildings which are replaced in a second phase by buildings with footings and associated storage pits. These structures offer many similarities with those excavated on the La-Delle-Saint-Martin site at Mondeville, some 800m north-west of la Sente. Examination of associated finds raises questions concerning the settlement’s function, its position in the hierarchy of early medieval habitat sites and more generally its place in a landscape densely occupied from prehistory until the end of the Middle Ages, as demonstrated by archaeology over the last forty years.