The view is beautiful to die for. It almost overlooks Lake Bourget, in western Savoie. After four months of excavations, the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) completed on Friday the study of a Merovingian site discovered this winter, ahead of a real estate development project in the town of Bourget-du- Lake, 10 kilometers from Chambéry. Researchers unearthed a 7th century cemetery. Populated by at least 80 individuals spread over forty graves, it would be the most important Merovingian burial site in Savoy.
Despite the number of bodies discovered, little furniture has been preserved by the Savoy land. “We have a few items of clothing, a few adornments, but it’s really insignificant compared to the number of burials,” archaeo-anthropologist Julien Blanco, from Inrap, told our colleagues from France 3. The position of the skeletons makes it possible to attest to the presence of coffins, which have now disappeared and have been reduced to dust over the centuries.
Now located along the Route des Catons, on a hill in the town, the cemetery has remained active long enough – a few decades at least – for several of its graves to be reused. Other graves also served as a collective grave. Requested by L’Essor savoyard, the Inrap researchers specified that the cemetery was well ordered, in several rows – testimony to the slow evolution of the necropolises of Late Antiquity towards the layout of the parish cemeteries of the Classical Middle Ages. The archaeologists have notably identified pits where up to four individuals rested. In keeping with Christian burial customs of the time, all bodies were facing east, towards Jerusalem.
The details of the excavation site were only presented from the last days of the operation, in order to preserve the safety of the remains and not to attract possible looters. The site was thus carefully concealed behind white tents, in the greatest secrecy. The Inrap team only lifted the veil on the results of their research during the month of June, for a municipal school visit organized a few days before the European Archeology Days. However, the site did not open its doors to the public for this meeting.
As the researchers pointed out, the cemetery had already been very partially probed in 1979, after the discovery of some remains during agricultural work. At the time, before the birth of modern preventive archaeology, a rudimentary salvage excavation had already made it possible to excavate three burials.
Now complete, the excavation operation will give way to the study phase of the furniture and human remains collected since February. Examination of the bones by the Institute’s anthropologists could provide new details on the Merovingians who died nearly 1,400 years ago in the vicinity of Lake Bourget.