If you chose to live on a limestone deposit that will break into flat stones, you have the perfect material to make…corbeled-arch buildings. Around here, these are called bories, and the village of Gordes has several hundred to the west of downtown, a small cluster of which were restored in the early 1970s, and are now owned by the town. The earliest in this cluster date to the 1400s, but the oldest known date to well before Christ. I believe this cluster was abandoned early in the 20th C. Anyway, they’re quite…interesting.

If you have a medieval mentality, you build on top of hills, and put your church on the highest ground. (Or maybe you command the populace to do so.) Terracing works to hold the slope yet make the steep terrain useful. Worldwide.

We wandered the small town square of Oppède-les-Poulivets (43.84360,5.16855), with about a dozen parked cars, and caught some nice late-afternoon light shots. Then a local bus arrived, and a bunch of kids got off, headed for the cars, and within three minutes, most of the cars had disappeared.

This entry was posted in archaeology on Tuesday, 2 October 2012 at 10:22 pm.
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