Looking South-West. France in the Middle Ages

International audienceThis chapter presents a selection of topics in French later medieval archaeology which are relevant to a British context, such as landscape archaeology, villages and agriculture, towns and building traditions, power and belief, and burial rites. The development of ‘preventive’ or developer-led archaeology has had a significant impact in France, not just on techniques such as large-scale stripping of rural sites and associated landscapes but also for the development of new themes such as bioarchaeology. In towns many studies now combine the study of buried structures with surviving buildings, textual sources and plan analysis. Themes such as power and belief, crafts and industry and funerary practices are summarized and may be compared against British perspectives. Among products exported to Britain were salt, stone from Caen which was cut to order and then shipped, and pottery