The GEOPRAS consortium comprises seven partners that have been involved for several years in coastal archaeology. Our programme studies the coastal societies of recent Prehistory (Mesolithic and Neolithic) on the French Atlantic shores in order to understand their social and economic organization and the role they play in broader historical dynamics such as neolithization. Characteristics such as the accumulation of goods through storage, specialised modes of production, and the emergence of a social hierarchy or a sedentary lifestyle are often attributed to these coastal populations, on the basis of ethnographic documents from the last two centuries. However, each of these social manifestations must be described according to regional environmental variables, without evolutionary preconceptions. Our research hypothesis is that environmental dynamics have greatly facilitated certain forms of historical evolution. This encourages us to determine with greater precision the nature of these environmental transformations, then to analyse human networks at the continent-ocean interface. The first task will be to restore the environmental benchmarks. During the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods, most coastal landscapes were radically transformed by the sea-level rise and the associated processes of erosion and sedimentation. The coastal environments of the past will be reproduced through a three-level approach combining a large scale (region) with an intermediate scale (nearby landscape) and a local scale (archaeological site). Our consortium proposes a combination of methods suited to different geographical conditions (dunes, rocky coasts, marshlands) around the Bay of Biscay, testing the limits of several of them. To gain the best possible understanding of an "archaeological signal", the GEOPRAS project will focus on developing rapid intervention and rescue methods for archaeology and geoarchaeology. We intend to apply these methods to sites currently being excavated or whose exploration is planned as part of the project, such as foreshore and marshland sites and shell middens. Optimal integrated methods and procedures will be developed for the recording of archaeological remains, which are often ephemeral on foreshores, as well as for sampling, particularly in shell middens. These procedures include geophysical surveys, archaeozoology, micromorphology, geochemistry, taphonomy, metagenomic approaches, and OSL datings. The second task is to study how human societies have managed the land-sea interface. Shell middens have become the emblematic nodes of these coastal Holocene settlements because they contain an abundance of bio-archaeological data. They will be analysed to judge biodiversity as well as food practices. The third task is to understand the specific features of technical systems in a maritime context, especially seafaring. This technical field is at the heart of all the questions raised about the relationships between coastal areas, as well as the decisive features of the various technical systems developed in these areas. To overcome the lack of knowledge of prehistoric watercraft, we suggest an approach, based on three disciplinary poles in permanent interaction: 1) ethnographic and historical references, 2) technological and use-wear analyses of lithic and bone tools, 3) experimentation. In addition to proposing methodological developments, we aim to lay down the conceptual, methodological and technical foundations of a maritime prehistory with procedures adapted to coastal heritage. The results will be included in a handbook of maritime prehistory, to be published in French and English. The involvement of amateur archaeologists, observers, tourists and other citizens in scientific tasks will be anticipated and coordinated by inviting them to take part in the main scientific meetings and, of course, in field operations such as surveys, excavations and experiments.

Pressures on ecosystems have reached such an unprecedented rate that many ecosystems have been irreversibly damaged and that many animal populations have declined since the 1950s. Although human pressures on ecosystems have been identified, the mechanisms of biodiversity decline (i.e. relative importance of each pressure in the decline, temporality of events…) are poorly known. One reason is the lack of long-term data on population monitoring to study the impact of human pressures from past to present on animal populations and communities. REPAST proposes to use a retrospective multidisciplinary approach to study the impact of environmental pressures on the decline of bats through the study of guano cores collected in bat roosts. In caves or buildings, bat droppings (guano) fall to the ground and accumulate chronologically until reaching substantial thickness over time, and constitute historical archives containing temporally situated information about bat populations, environmental context, and human pressures. REPAST will test the general hypothesis that one or several stressors (habitat and climate changes, exposure to pollutants) will be associated to temporal variations of biological responses (pathogen prevalence, shift in diet, genetic diversity, bat richness). On 10 cores already sampled in bat colonies located in Burgundy Franche-Comté region, a robust chronology based on proxies used for paleoecological studies (14C, 137Cs, 210Pb concentrations) will be performed. The feasibility study done within the last 2 years shows that the cores date back from at least the 1950s, one being much older. Temporal variations of some anthropogenic pressures will also be reconstructed. Pollens will be studied on the cores to reconstruct the foraging areas (habitat) characteristics. The concentrations of some pollutants (~20 metals, 17 persistent organic pollutants including DDT and PCBs, and neonicotinoids) will be measured along the cores. Climate changes will be studied using meteorological data from 76 stations active since the 1940s across the region. Guano cores will also provide biological descriptors of bat colonies, which will be related to human pressures indices. The richness and composition of bat colonies, their diet using a metabarcoding approach, their exposure to eukaryotic pathogens, and their genetic diversity (using guano and Museum specimens already collected) will be reconstructed over time. Finally, historical archives and current counts from NGOs working in bat conservation will allow reconstructing the pattern of demographic trends and extinction risk of bat species since the 1940s. As the various anthropogenic pressures may act directly or indirectly on the biological responses, the complex set of variables measured in REPAST will be analysed using the structural equation modelling (SEM) framework. SEM’s causal diagrams will be constructed, based on explicit causal assumptions/hypotheses related to the mechanisms supposed to be involved between one or several pressures to one or several biological responses. The nature and the pattern of associations (what stressor(s) is(are) linked to what response(s) and how (from long and continuous associations to sudden shifts)) will improve our understanding of the mechanism(s) of bat decline. NGOs and stakeholders of bat roosts will be fully involved in the project and have already took part in the sampling process and share their data (e.g. bat counts). Apart from the classical scientific exploitation of the results (international meetings and articles), the large public will also be informed and invited to participate (e.g. in indicating colonies with guano accumulation unknown from NGOs) through a specific website and conferences. REPAST will allow gaining insights in the understanding of the mechanisms underlying the decline and the temporality of bat decline (and resilience) and, as some of the stressors still occur, may allow to predict and prevent new declines.

The project PARABAINO intends to address massacres and extreme violence through the ancient Greek and Roman experience in a comparative and multidisciplinary perspective (Anthropology, Archaeology, History, History of Art, Classical Philology, and Philosophy). The aim is to study the genesis of such practices by placing the Ancient World in the global debate on genocide and mass violence. As a result, we shall not only better understand the ancient societies but also contribute to an overall reflection on the subject. Research on genocide highlights the everlasting nature of mass violence, but also the difficulty of addressing it by means of a wording put forward by Westerners in the twentieth century. One of the main scientific obstacles to be overcome within this project will therefore be conceptual and terminological. Greek and Roman civilizations certainly knew of massacres (abusing people, destruction, mass enslavement, deportation, etc.), thinking in and graphically depicting them. Studying such civilizations makes us deeply reflect on identity, otherness and gender, dehumanization in short, and their resulting crises. Moreover, such studies provide us with “models” which in fact question the modern conceptualizations and interpretations of mass violence and their narrations, how they were put in history books, their memorialization and commemoration. Such ancient evidence constitutes useful paradigms of extremely convulsive situations at war. Moreover, their study through the looking glass of transgression will allow us to avoid any form of ranking put forward by any legal arrangement we may encounter in the historical evidence. We thus aim to foster a cutting-edge view of the past in order to illuminate our own present. In order to achieve such a goal, genocide will become the key of our global analysis instead of addressing it as a mere prerequisite for understanding war as an annihilation phenomenon with traumatic side effects. After listing the relevant facts involved, this project will focus its attention on the processes of liberation by determining timings and responsibilities. Then, their transgressive dimension will be questioned as well as the steps taken to assimilate, circumscribe and neutralize such destructive practices and their effects. Analysing transgressions will pose new queries regarding the foundations of the societies facing them. For instance, whose sacred values are tested when the physical integrity of men, women and children have been seriously damaged and even monuments destroyed? How do we measure and mould intolerance? In order to respond to such questions, the PARABAINO project team will conduct research through a corpus of evidence shared in an intranet. Such database will constitute the basis of our scholarly work, in addition to the methodological and epistemological choices put forward by project members. The aforementioned corpus will then be made available online in a simplified form for the benefit of researchers, secondary school teachers and the general public. The website will therefore provide free access by searching patterns to the analytical files of the main textual and iconographic sources, alongside the thematic files. Additionally, bibliography, a lexicon, summaries of articles and recordings of communications will be made available. Indeed, the scientific meetings answering the questions posed by the project and their publication results will complete the dissemination and valorisation of the project outcome. In particular, data will be also available to students and researchers, scholars from the ancient world but also from social sciences, all interested in genocide and mass violence. Thus the PARABAINO project, by focusing its main study on Antiquity, proposes to become a scientific point of departure for deeper and more general reflection on genocide which has already begun to be conducted by all sorts of specialists and public in general.

The “Neolithic way of life" developed in the Caucasus ca. 6200 BCE, which is fairly late when compared with the astonishing steps taken by Near-Eastern cultures in the neighbouring Fertile Crescent as early as the 9th mill. BC. The existence of organic links between the Neolithisation process of the Near-East and that of the Caucasus is still a matter of debate, but the Caucasus no doubt appears as a marginal, backward area in the overall dynamics that shaped part of South-western Asia in the early Holocene. During the following period, i.e. the Chalcolithic, these dynamics seemingly changed completely and South-Western Asia underwent a progressive shift in its centre of gravity: some time ca. the 5th-4th mill. BC, a change in circulation flows appeared in the obsidian procurement strategies of Iranian and north Mesopotamian communities, which started to exploit Caucasian obsidian beds as well, instead of focusing on East Anatolian deposits. This shift in obsidian sourcing networks is coeval with the development of major technical innovations such as extractive copper metallurgy and the production of wool fabrics, which led to the systematic exploitation of a new range of raw materials (salt and metal ores) and probably entailed the appropriation of new territories - the Highlands. At any rate, it appears that Transcaucasia became a major source of attraction for human groups living in Iran, North Mesopotamia and beyond from the Late Chalcolithic onwards (ca. 4500 BCE), as shown by the number of Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age sites found in the Araxes and Urmiah basins. How should these profound, structural, changes be interpreted? The explanation that leaps to mind is of course that major changes in economic flows were prompted by technical innovations. We need to test this hypothesis by breaking down the intricate relationships between the development of these innovations, the quest for raw materials, and the rise of other practices, such as vertical pastoralism or long-distance nomadism. Indeed, innovations, which may be technological or zootechnological, may have involved the migrations and/or increasing mobility of human groups living in the Near and Middle East, as claimed by several studies. But the processes underlying the changes in economic flows are still poorly understood, while the reality of human migrations from the Near-East towards the Caucasus during the 4th mill. BC has been actively challenged. Altogether, it is the agency of Late Prehistoric Caucasian communities that is being debated, between a centre-vs-periphery perspective that considers the Highlands as a mere source of raw materials, exploited by the proto-urban communities of the lowlands, and an analytical stance that places the evolution of the Caucasus within the complexity of Eurasian dynamics in Late Prehistory, which integrates not only the Near and Middle East but also the Pontic universe and the northern steppes. Thus, this project lies at the core of on-going international research on: a) the neolithisation processes of the Caucasus, b) the interactions between the Caucasus and the Near and Middle-East from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Considering the state of the art, we have three goals in mind: i) the study of the Caucasian Neolithic, as seen from the Araxes basin, with a special emphasis on its possible connections with the Neolithic communities of the Fertile Crescent; ii) the study of interregional economic networks between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, in relationship with the emergence of new economic hubs; iii) the study of the human mosaic developing in the Highlands during the 4th mill., with a view to identifying the various cultural groups involved in what appears as a "copper rush".

The Notre-Dame de Paris (NDP) wooden oak frame is one of the greatest masterpieces of Gothic carpentry in France. It was constructed during the High Middle Ages (HMA) between the 11th and 13th centuries, at a time of profound environmental and societal changes – climate optimum, strong demographic and economic growth – which created significant pressure on available forest resources, one of the key economic drivers of medieval societies. The destruction of the NDP wood framework in the fire of 15 April 2019 left thousands of charred and fragmented oak wood pieces. Analyzing this "forest" means to almost go back in time, by rebuilding the forests of past centuries and restoring this heritage for the public. The CASIMODO project aims to understand the impact of climatic and anthropogenic factors on the evolution of the HMA forest–wood socio-ecosystem: forest, raw wood material management, and manufactured end products in the Île-de-France and Paris Basin. The project proposes three lines of research to address society’s adaptive response to the availability of wood resources during the HMA. The first purpose is to define the climatic and the socio-economical context of Paris. In order to identify the potential technical adaptations of the medieval society, the second objective is to study the timber and destroyed framework from an archaeological point of view in order to characterize the construction supply methods of the building site. The third purpose consists of characterizing the forest stands exploited in the 11th–13th c., their management, and the possible silvicultural systems used for the production of adequate timber. The overall goal of CASIMODO is to provide crucial information and enable a fuller understanding of the evolution of an economic area under climatic, societal and demographic pressure, through the wood life cycle. We propose to develop an integrated approach by combining history, archaeology and bioarchaeology. Trees record variations in environmental variables, with each annual growth ring containing a means of dating, and a set of anatomical and chemical markers indicators providing information of the woodland structure, the geographical origin of the wood, and past climate. This information will be compared with contemporaneous wood data from secular and religious medieval frames from Northern France, Southern Belgium and Western Germany. Complementary proxies, such as textual archives and paleoenvironmental/bioarchaeological data of medieval archaeological sites in the Île-de-France and Paris Basin will also be integrated. By echoing the context of the current ecological threat, this project addresses recurring problems in human–nature relations and is in line with the theme of societies facing environmental change. Improved documentation of temporal and spatial variability in past global climates is needed to better anticipate the possible impacts of future climate change. CASIMODO can provide indirect clues on the extent of deforestation or even natural disasters and linked epidemics such as the plague. In addition, radiocarbone dating is a central tool of modern science (biology, ecology, geology, history, archaeology.); however, it is still hampered by the imprecision of dates obtained for certain periods. Progress in this direction will, therefore, be a major step forward for very large section of the scientific community