L’archéologie préventive appliquée à l’architecture civile de Metz

Metz was a laboratory for archaeology applied to buildings, a result of heritage emergencies since the mid-nineteenth century, and then thanks to the implementation and coordination of skills made available by the Regional Service of Archaeology (SRA). In the 1980s and 1990s, the city remained an almost unheard-of model for the archaeology of buildings in France. Since 2002, studies carried out by Inrap on buildings for civilian use have, thanks to reliable data, fed research on the architecture of medieval houses of Metz; from the great patrician construction groups to an isolated infilled beam socket, the scale of observation of remains is multiple. Archaeology applied to domestic architecture is also a history of conservation, reuse and reemployment. It is a thought process of latent continuities in know-how, manufacturing methods and modes, urban use and their effects on today’s city. By in situ study and preservation, discoveries are rehabilitated in a dimension that has become timeless, but that is always cultural and, in the future, will undoubtedly be environmental. Knowledge acquired via archaeology must also be reused locally, by creating and filling a data bank and designing a map of technical solutions for the players involved in renovation.