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The argument linking the permanence of ownership with a form of fixation of plot layouts through construction echoes the connection between durée and dureté described earlier. In the 1970s, the architect Pierre Pinon described the way in which certain Roman amphitheaters were progressively replaced by dwellings built on top of the ancient foundations (Pinon 1978). The parcel system constitutes a record of ways in which the land was used, even after it has ceased to accomplish a given function. Plots illustrate the contours of a monument, and these lines are “hardened” by buildings on these foundations. The footprint of extinct material structures thus “grows up” from the ground (Pinon 1994, p. 40)ssss1. Describing the “mechanisms of memory in the parcel system”, the architect Bernard Gauthiez highlighted the links between legal and material criteria. He assigned a major role to the influence exerted by public power, guaranteeing the persistence of public land boundaries, while also noting that the persistence of boundaries is “strengthened by the tendency in urban settlements, at least from the late Middle Ages on, to construct dwellings along boundary lines”ssss1 (Gauthiez 1999, p. 19).