Excavating a French Abbey

French archaeologists have completed the excavation of Beaumont Abbey near Tours in the Loire Valley, which was a Benedictine nunnery for 788 years. Excavation leader Philippe Blanchard gave an interview about the project that is posted on the INRAP web site. (In French but Google Translate is good at French.)

What is extraordinary is that we excavated the entirety of a medieval and modern abbey. On other sites, we will excavate part of the refectory, the church, the cemetery or a kitchen, but here, we have the whole thing: the church, the cloister, the gardens, the cemeteries, the wall enclosure, and this, from the origins, from the foundation of the abbey in 1002, until 1790, when the Benedictines were expelled. We have even unearthed older remains of the village of Beaumont dating from the 9th -10th centuries , located under the abbey. This is the first time in Europe that the entire space of an abbey, including the gardens, has been excavated in one go.

Beaumont was an aristocratic place; one abbess was a granddaughter of Louis XIV. In the 1500s about 60 nuns lived there; at its closure in 1790 46 cloistered women still called it home.

Much of the archaeological effort focused on burials, of which 1040 were excavated. They span the whole history of the nunnery. In a favored spot like the Lady Chapel (above), the burials would be wealthy people interred in stone sarcophagi, but the site also included hundreds of humbler graves.

Carving on one sarcophagus.

Figurines found under the nave of the church.

Truly a remarkable project.