The Roman prehistory :
Since the end of the Roman occupation, IVth century, until the XIIth century, the barbaric invasions followed each other in Southwest emptying the country of its inhabitants.
forests gained the grounds hitherto exploited in Périgord, from where denomination of Périgord Noir.
In the XIIth century, beginning of the War of Hundred Years against the English, the worry to populate the country to avoid the English occupation, as well as to create some gates to the progress of the Catharism, was at the origin of the flight in the country of monasteries sheltering different religious orders. This time sees the construction of numerous abbeys and the restoration of the old with new architectural techniques. One generalized, for example, the use of the arch in stone in replacement of the framework made of wood, vulnerable to the fires. This new art to construct is known under the appellation of Romanesque art.
Correspondent at one period of demographic revival and massive construction, this art is largely represented in Périgord, recognizable with its pure forms, almost severe, cut in a beautiful fair and luminous limestone, which is one of the major assets of architecture périgourdine. In the XIIth century one counts four hundred Romance churches in Périgord.

The Neolithic art
Corresponds to one time of deep climatic change lasting which one records a no less deep human society change, populating regions of where the last glaciations retires progressively from the millennial VIIIth before J. -C. to the millennial Life, vestiges let by the population of the future France attest that to hunters living in a very cold climate substitute themselves of the settled agriculturists, living in huts grouped in villages. Underground cave only serve to the storage of food and, probably, of made objects in view of exchanges

The Neolithic
Movable art found new supports: the ceramics mud know, starting from Iith millennium before J-C, a universal success. Covered with a geometrical ornament stereotyped and manufactured in series, they are marketed quickly. Richer in creative invention than the mud, the goldsmith proceeds of a technique which confines with virtuosity; it passes today to be the great art of the Celts, these people thus named by the Greeks, who, starting from Vth C., invade the Kingdom of France