This work presents the results of research on metallic artefacts dating from the 9th to the 17th century. The research began as early as 1997 at the Université de Picardie-Jules Verne as part of a doctoral thesis defended in 2001, supervised by Prof. Philippe Racinet. The corpus then consisted of groups of artefacts found in scheduled or preventive excavations in Picardy, and, to a lesser extent, in museum collections.

It seemed first of all essential to present the historiography of this kind of research, which explains its difficult beginnings. Thus, our first chapter recounts the slow evolution of this discipline, from the 60’s to the present day, citing its most significant figures and their contributions. In Picardy, in the context of rescue excavations, and, later, of preventive archaeology, specialists in this field for the Medieval and Modern periods were few and far between. These kinds of research concerned mainly the metallic artefacts from Celtic or Merovingian cemeteries, which attracted large subsidies and had access to one of the first restoration laboratories, located at that time at Compiègne.

The second chapter presents the largely unpublished sites of Picardy together with their corpus of metallic objects. Hence, the chronological limits of this research were determined by the choice of sites. The interesting point here was to present artefacts from sites of different status: castles, villages, priories, farms, towns, underground refuges… Taking account, too, of a number of museum collections, was an opportunity to characterize the choices made in the conservation of artefacts.

The third chapter deals with the typological and functional study of each kind of artefact. These objects are studied, in parallel with chronological data, in the light of different approaches, mostly technical, then ethnological, always bearing in mind the external scientific evidence concerning ancient human activity. To this end, our sample group was extended by the addition of a large number of sets of artefacts studied after the completion of the thesis.

The final chapter gives the original catalogue with drawings and notes about a total of 800 objects.
The scientific purpose of this work is to define the outlines of this area of regional material culture in the Medieval and Modern periods. This research highlights a complex process: the diversification and improvement of metallic artefacts over a long period, benefiting from long-term technical progress. Twenty years later, in spite of the study of over a hundred regional and extra-regional series, the scope of investigations appears to be even wider. This publication is thus a modest contribution to this new discipline, which has only very recently been officially recognized.

<i>Traduction : Margaret & Jean-louis CADOUX</i>