Quand l’archéologie des techniques doit être transdisciplinaire. Réflexions à partir de l’exemple des capacités de cuisson dans les cuisines de château au bas Moyen Âge

Since the 1980s, over-specialization of archaeolgy has been creating barriers between researchers, even when they are working in fields that could be complementary. It seems that, more and more often, a body of work is established before formuating the questions, where it should be the opposite. This archaeological specialisation allows great technical advances, and detailed analysis of the abundant information is necessary, but is also detrimental to the study of more general topics. In this way, we are more often offering descriptions and less often a global understanding, losing the general public for whom we are supposed to work, when the public may actually be the key to geting out of these current crises in archaeology. But can we find another approach without losing the advantages of the specialization?The study of the cooking capabilities in the castle’s kitchen of late medieval nothern France outlines how restrictive a specialized approach would be and the need to find a transdisciplinary approach (where trans- means it try to make disapear the borders between disciplines). Indeed, the size of the meat pieces and the cut of the animal bones, the cooking pottery size, the different type of fireplaces—to present just a few examples—have to be considered all together.While being aware that noone could be a “specialist of everything”, this communication attempts to present the study of the culinary practices through an approach that use the methods and the knowledge of various archaeological specialities (archaeozoologists, archaeobotannist, field archaeologist, ceramologist…), while asking new questions of the material evidence, linked to a more general topic. Depuis les années 1980, la surspécialisation de l’archéologie, nécessaire et découlant naturellement de l’évolution technique des méthodes, efficace à bien des égards, a néanmoins entraîné une forme d’opacité entre les différentes composantes de notre discipline. Les sujets de recherche eux-mêmes s’en voient affectés, cloisonnés dans un cadre qui les limite à type de matériel choisi. Peut-être est-ce de ce fait que l’archéologie a aujourd’hui tendance à se tourner, de plus en plus, vers un travail descriptif plus que sur des questions générales, perdant sans doute au passage le grand public qui en est pourtant l’avenir en ces temps de crise. Est-il néanmoins possible d’envisager, sans pour autant annuler l’effet positif des spécialités, une autre forme d’approche ?Illustrant les limites qu’impl