ABSTRACT

Since 1973, the historic center of Saint-Denis, a town located nine kilometers north of Paris, has undergone extensive urban redevelopment, providing archeologists with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to undertake a major archeological research program. Extensive archeological research in the historical center of Saint-Denis over the past twenty years provides a major corpus of artifact evidence for material culture in the Paris area at the beginning of the fifteenth century. More than a quarter of the old town, an area of approximately thirty two acres to the north of the royal basilica, has been covered by rescue excavation. Although written sources seem to indicate that the city remained prosperous during the first half of the Hundred Years War, Saint-Denis suffered twenty-six years of disasters from 1410 until 1436.