Method and methodology

This project was planned as a multi-disciplinary study. While drawing on the techniques of a range of specialists, the principal methods used were gathering and analysis of written data from archive collections, a staged programme of archaeological fieldwork and a systematic survey of standing buildings in the core communes. At an early stage of the project we also went through all the then available (high level and oblique) aerial photographs; and in 1996 we consulted the recent photographs taken by Maurice Gautier. Both early (1980–81) and late (1995) we consulted the records of existing sites and previous archaeological activity in the region; these were originally housed in the archives of the Direction des antiquités de Bretagne at Brest but are now at the Service régional de l’archéologie de Bretagne, in Rennes (hereafter SRAB). ¹ We made no more than a modest use of place-name evidence since, although there are many excellent studies, place-names are difficult to use for microhistory when there are no, or few, dated early name forms.