Résumé
During the late Middle Ages, northern Catalonia (Pyrénées-Orientales, France) experienced a great economic and demographic growth, which led to greater pressure on the wooded landscape. In the county of Roussillon, creating new farmland was a key issue during the 12th-14th centuries, as rural areas became increasingly involved in the production of resources for Mediterranean trade, particularly with other Catalan counties (Cerdanya, Barcelona). For example in Roussillon, medieval textual archives describe how land clearance and the exploitation of inland wetlands allowed the extension of grazing areas and farmland. During this time, the city of Perpignan was developing rapidly: it became during the 13th century the capital of the Kingdom of Majorca, consolidating its position as the political, legal and economic centre of Roussillon over the following centuries. The city's expansion led to a growing demand for resources, necessitating the management of woodland for the production of fuel, timber and the cultivation of fruit trees. Little is known about this management during the 15th-16th century, or about the impact it may have had on the surrounding landscape. For this presentation, anthracological data from two late medieval/early modern settlements in Perpignan (15th-16th centuries) were processed in order to determine the composition and state of the woodlands exploited by the city. The obtained information shed new light on the exploitation of wood resources in post-medieval Catalonia, by comparing it with studies carried out on another major catalan urban site (Mercat del Born, Barcelona). Our study reveals the exploitation of a mixed sclerophyll oak woodland formation for fuel production, the town changing its supply area between the 10th and the 16th centuries, obtaining its fuel from preserved woodland areas in the hinterland rather than from the surrounding degraded plant landscapes. These results corroborate those from Mercat del Born, where the predominance of evergreen oak in the fuel is attributed to the targeted exploitation of different woodland areas, rather than that of a nearby woodland. The large proportion of charcoal fragments belonging to fruit trees (mainly olive trees, but also fig trees, pomegranates, grapevines and walnut trees) raises the question of whether they were grown locally (urban garden ?) or imported via the various existing trade networks.