Research

Ancient Greek architecture featured numerous metal seals to ensure the cohesion and stability of buildings. These seals take different forms, depending on their static role and the period in which they were used. They are made of iron, copper, bronze or lead. The systematic inventory and analysis of these artefacts at two emblematic sites of Greek architecture, Delphi and Delos, will not only shed light on their role in construction, but also, thanks to the analysis of metals and their isotopes, determine the origin of the ores and metal production techniques. These results should renew our knowledge of metal supply circuits in antiquity.

Partner(s):

• Musée du Louvre (Paris)
• Center de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (Paris)
• École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Strasbourg (France)
• Laboratoire Archéologies et sciences de l'Antiquité (ArScAn - Paris)
• French School of Athens
• French Society for the Study of Mining and Metallurgy (Société française pour l'étude des mines et de la métallurgie)

The project presented merges the humanities and computer sciences to streamline architectural surveys and promote interdisciplinarity. By jointly exploiting innovative technologies such as deep learning, computer vision and virtual reality, as yet little used in archaeology, it opens up new perspectives for the study of historic monuments. Currently, the manual survey of archaeological structures, based on 3D models, is laborious and fragmented. The aim of the project is to unify these processes by combining AI and traditional techniques to create immersive and collaborative visualizations, facilitating the production of new knowledge. The multidisciplinary team already has a variety of datasets, collected from Mediterranean sites, and has achieved promising results in modeling and segmentation of constructive elements.

Partner(s):

• Center Camille Jullian (Aix-en-Provence)

Within a given timeframe, in this case the Middle Ages from the 12th to the 15th centuries, this codicology - experimental paleography and reconstructive archaeology project aims to show the diversity of writings produced and used by men and women in the medieval West. From the point of view of both form and languages used, the aim is to select writings that bear witness to the diversity of medieval Western cultures existing in Europe at the time.

Various types of medieval writings in Latin and/or Hebrew characters will therefore be reproduced in facsimile from identified, known and studied sources.

The Latin and Hebrew scripts used will be French, Iberian or Catalan, English or German. They will enable us to observe the differences between and within these cultural groups.

Produced on parchment or paper, the project will involve the identical reproduction of extracts from 1) volumina for Hebrew liturgical scrolls from northern and southern France, 2) documentary Latin rotuli , 3) literary codices in various formats (from monumental to very small) in Latin and Hebrew, 4) documentary codexes such as Latin or Hebrew registers, 5) documents (charters, staff letters) in Latin and Hebrew.

An innovative, artistic binding will be used to hold together the various manuscript samples that make up the OMMNI. Teaching paleography and the heritage of manuscript know-how will be at the heart of the project.

Direct partners :

• Association Le Garage (Forcalquier)
• Laboratoire France Amériques Espagne - Sociétés Pouvoir Acteurs (FRAMESPA - Toulouse)
• University of Perpignan
• Public libraries and archives

Secondary partners :

• Institute for Research and History of Texts (IRHT - Paris)
• Divided Materials, Interfaces, Reactivity and Electrochemistry Laboratory (MADIREL - Marseille)

The aim of the project is to study private Roman architecture using an approach combining textual analysis and fieldwork, through training and research activities. Our ambition is to deepen our understanding of the vocabulary of private housing by confronting it with data from building archaeology, excavations and the study of collections, based on the site of Saint-Romain-en-Gal, an outlying district of the colony of Vienna, the most northerly of the colonies in Narbonese Gaul.

This project, which brings together two Aix Marseille Université and ARKAIA laboratories, the Centre Camille Jullian and the TDMAM, is based on the launch of a new collaboration with the Museum and archaeological sites of Saint-Romain-en-Gal. Our aim will be to work with the museum to develop an attractive research-based training program, based on Aix Marseille Université's new Archaeology, Science for Archaeology and Humanities masters courses. In addition to training, the project will lead to the organization of international study days in synergy with the Museum's scientific program in 2025 and the Roman Seasons exhibition, which will present the famous Seasons mosaic from Saint-Romain-en-Gal for the first time on site.

Partner(s):

• Saint-Romain-en-Gal Museum and Gallo-Roman sites

2012 saw the publication of Historic Nicosia, edited by Demetrios Michaelides, a remarkable collective work tracing the history of Nicosia from the Neolithic period to the English occupation. This reference volume is a synthesis of research carried out over many years by historians, art historians and archaeologists, putting texts, monuments and relics of material culture into perspective. In the same spirit, but more modestly from a chronological point of view, this international project traces the history of Paphos, a port city in southeastern Cyprus, in the Frankish (1192-1474) and Venetian (1474-1571) eras, based on the joint exploitation of archives from the Lusignan kingdom, the Genoese and the Serenissima, portulans and nautical charts, travelers' accounts, archaeological remains and environmental history.

Partner(s):

• History Research Group (GRHis - Rouen)
• University of Cyprus (Cyprus)
• Institut de recherches et d'histoire des textes (IRHT - Paris)
• French School of Athens
• King's College (London)
• Laboratoire Histoire et sources des mondes antiques (HISOMA - Lyon)
• University of Sydney (Australia)
• Archaeology of Mediterranean Societies Laboratory (ASM - Montpellier)
• Università degli studi di Catania (Italy)
• Department of Antiquities of Cyprus
• University of Zurich (Switzerland)

The aim of this project is to develop an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the impact of man on mountain environments, around the Jujal wetland and Lac Profond in the commune of Orcières, in the Ecrins massif (alt. 2100-2400 m, Hautes-Alpes). The aim is to exploit paleoecological and archaeological data never before available in the Haut Champsaur. Paleoecological data (palynology, geomorphology, paleoentomology and pedoanthracology) will be correlated with the contribution of archaeological sites identified during a high-altitude pedestrian survey. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the impact of human activities on mountain ecosystems, and to propose an interdisciplinary approach on the scale of the European Alps.

This project follows on from a program of partial archaeological survey and study of the Cistercian Abbey of Sénanque, carried out in 2023-2021 as part of restoration work. This work, which had highlighted the potential of an archaeological analysis of the building based on a stone-by-stone survey combining both manual and digital approaches, had enabled us to characterize in detail the organization of the building site, from stone-cutting to implementation, and to specify the progress of the work well beyond the achievements of previous research. The study of the cloister will be based on an interdisciplinary interaction of further archaeological analysis of the building, geological analysis of the building stones, particularly those selected for the sculpture, and a new detailed study of the latter, already initiated in the context of a colloquium paper, which constitutes the most elaborate ensemble in the field of Cistercian monumental decoration in southeastern France today.

Partner(s):

• Montpellier Center for Medieval Studies

The VRAK3D project lies at the crossroads of several disciplines: archaeology, architecture, knowledge representation, and is based on innovative technologies: computer vision, deep learning, virtual and augmented reality. Based on the observation that, while obtaining 3D models in the field of heritage is now virtually resolved and no longer part of the field of Research, the link between knowledge and geometry remains embryonic.

This project is divided into four phases around the Glanum site, which has been extensively excavated since the 1920s:

1. Development of a 3D model of the site capable of supporting the archaeological knowledge already acquired, as well as serving as a user interface to help generate new knowledge (drone and terrestrial photogrammetry).
2. Development and formalization of a corpus of archaeological objects using ontologies aligned with existing work in the community (CRM-CIDOC, for example). This formalization of knowledge will describe both morphological aspects and the relationships that these elements may have with each other. For example, the topological relationship between a capital and an architrave.
3. Research these objects using deep learning on all the photos taken to obtain the 3D model. The search for these elements includes a phase of labeling the objects on the photos (e.g. blocks, capitals, column shafts, architraves, etc.), then searching them on all the photos of the site, and finally a 3D localization using the orientations of the photos calculated by photogrammetry.
4. The virtual reality aspects of the project will be broken down into several faculties: virtual tour of the site (headset and web), interface with current knowledge (e.g. corpus, archives, bibliography), manipulation of corpus elements identified on the 3D model by satisfying relationship constraints defined in ontologies, partial and virtual anastylosis with geometric quantification of relationship relevance.

Partner(s):

• Università di Sassari (Italy)

Identifying species is a major challenge in archaeology in order to better understand the history of human/animal relationships. The recently developed ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry) method enables this identification to be made, via collagen peptide analysis. Minimally or non-invasively invasive, ZooMS overcomes the limitations inherent in traditional archaeozoology, such as the fragmentation of bone remains, the lack of diagnostic anatomical criteria or the transformation of organic remains during operational chains. The PepT*ID project will develop this method within the consortium, and will address a number of scientific issues facing the partner laboratories, such as 1) distinguishing between morphologically similar taxa (caprini, antilopini, cervidae), 2) discriminating between unidentifiable remains, 3) identifying the animal origin of materials used by past societies to manufacture objects, and 4) ensuring the reliability of isotopic reference frames. The PepT*ID project, which is both diachronic and interdisciplinary, is also intended to generate a strong structuring effect within the host institute by offering workshops (English/French) for PhD students and master's students, thus contributing to the attractiveness of the training courses. The overall strategic objective is to initiate the development of new expertise as part of an Internationally-oriented Research dynamic (possibly leading to an application for a European Union grant).

Partner(s):

• Laboratoire Archéologie des sociétés méditerranéennes (ASM - Montpellier)
• Tunisian National Heritage Institute (INP)
• Marseille Proteomics Laboratory (MaP - Marseille)
• Urgonia Museum (Orgon)

The Epi2DAP project focuses on the automatic recognition of letterforms engraved on Cherchell's ancient inscriptions. With LIS expertise, processing will be applied to 2,000 digitized images from the CCJ photo library and the EpiCherchell Open Access database, to confirm and refine the dates proposed by epigraphists.

The establishment of a precise chronology based on character shapes, forms used and the evolution of wording, using a batch of archaeologically dated inscriptions, will enable us to anchor all the inscriptions in their historical context and thus enrich the history of the area. This attempt at unsupervised chronological serialization, applied to these unique and technically heterogeneous ancient images, will provide an "objective" classification of the writings, which will be submitted to the expertise of EpiCherchell epigraphists and specialists with a view to programmed publications.

A formalism for representing and querying the information produced will be studied. The aim will be to express the spatio-temporal relationships between inscriptions, and to integrate the analyses produced by HISOMA into the "Text Encoding Initiative" (XML/TEI) format. This innovative process will constitute a study model applicable to other corpora and scripts, and will serve as the basis for the Internationally doctoral workshop on digital epigraphy.

Partner(s):

• History and Sources of Ancient Worlds Laboratory (HISOMA - Lyon)