Looting and trafficking of cultural heritage from conflict areas to the European markets stand for an increasing phenomenon with strong consequences in terms of security, economics, culture and society. Smugglers take advantage of disparate frameworks, providing the artefacts with a fake background in order to give them the appearance of legality, before proposing them to the market. Although the protagonists in the fight (law enforcement agencies, justice, structures devoted to cultural heritage, art market) can know each other, the potential for cooperation still remains underexploited: time, resources and space limitations, discrepancies between approaches, practices and work cultures. The gap which is noticeable at the national level gets broader at the European scale. Nevertheless, each of those professional bodies is keeping a part of the solution: resource inventory, knowledge of the artefacts, production areas and fraudulent cases, proof culture, rates and trends changing. A cooperation protocol as well as a Pan-European collaborative tool for control, able to cross investigation data, are strongly required. POLAR project (“POLice and ARchaeology against cultural heritage trafficking”) was born in 2016 through the National Council of Scientific Research “Attentats Recherche” special call for proposals. It aims to identify relevant structures and tools, facilitating dialogue between professional spheres (methodology sharing, legal frameworks, slowdown levers identification). It is composed of three phases: Understand, Act and Prevent. As POLAR implies to work at the European level, an international consortium is currently built in keeping with professional divisions such as LEAs/Justice/Cultural Heritage/Art Market. The Cultural Heritage team maps the “artefacts in peril” as presented on the ICOM Red Lists. A digital tool will be built in order to find occurrences on Internet and to compare the proposed background to the archaeological evidences. In so doing, the protocol will reinforce the expertise and detect possibly fraudulent cases. If needed and according to the recognitions, a warning notice could be transmitted to the authorities. The approach will offer guarantees to honest buyers and sellers, avoiding the potential misfortunes related to ancient transactions led without due diligence and facilitating the lasting recovery of misled-traceability works of art, bringing the proof of the ancient provenance. POLAR will lead to training and information actions in a complex and unknown field. The dissemination phase implies to explore restitution ways for saved artefacts. Those actions will help to know more about them and to raise public awareness. Outputs are expected in the field of security, economics, society and culture. POLAR manages a large quantity of data, opening up fieldworks and enable the expression of innovative methodologies in order to face a security challenge. This cooperation is brand new in its form and breadth. A consultation about frames, methods and strategy is required to tackle the European scale. The planned call for the proposal is SU-FCT03-2018 (republished in 2019-2020): Information and data stream management to fight against (cyber)crime and terrorism. The ANR MRSEI tool seems to be the appropriate launch pad in order to lead the preliminary discussions, reinforce the consortium and provide it with the dedicated working space. The project also meets the needs of the SU-TRANSFORMATIONS-09-2018 call, whose topic is « Social platform on endangered cultural heritage and on illicit trafficking of cultural goods ». For this one, the deadline for submission is 13 March 2018, without assurance of renewal, which imply a more tightened calendar.

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".

EVOSHEEP proposes to document how Near Eastern and Middle Eastern societies developed sheep farming and how this influenced their history using a multidisciplinary approach drawing on evidence from different sources: archaeozoology, philology, iconography and paleogenetics from a wide temporal (6000-1000 BC) and geographic scale (Near East and Middle East, the Caucasus). This approach conducted on ancient breeds will be completed by work on modern breeds (sheep with hairy fleece or hair from Lebanon, Iran, Ethiopia) to provide new biometric and genetic reference records more adequate than European races for further scientific research. The originality of EVOSHEEP is to combine morphometric and genetic data from ancient and modern breeds to document the pace of the emergence of sheep breed in the course of the complexification of Near and Middle Eastern societies.

Research on the Kura-Araxes (KA) phenomenon (Early Bronze, 3500-2500 BCE) has been extremely dynamic for the last twenty years: the diffusion from the South Caucasian homeland (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) to Anatolia, Iran, and the Levant from 3000 BCE onwards, as well as the conditions of emergence and collapse of this culture, have attracted extensive attention. HOMELAND aims to shed light on an aspect of KA societies that is still very poorly known, namely the transition between KA I and II on the territory of Armenia, both at the roots and at the crossroads of the KA phenomenon. Recent research in Armenia has shown that the KA sequence was divided into two phases known as KA I and II with a transition around 2900 BCE. This pivotal period experiences the replacement of an early complex marked by the homogeneity of ceramic material (KA I) by a phase of fragmentation characterized by the emergence of four regional cultural facies (KA II), the massive abandonment of KA I settlements, and the creation of new ones. The originality of HOMELAND lies in its comparative approach which is based on the simultaneous study of four sites (Karnut, Ayrum, Voskeblur, Artanish) located in each of the sub-regions. For each of them, the most important aspects of daily life will be traced, including architectural traditions, material culture (lithic, macrolithic and metallic artifacts), subsistence strategies and natural resource supply strategies. The main objectives are (1) to characterize the way of life of these KA II communities in each of the four cultural complexes in order to determine the specificities and similarities of their trajectories, (2) to model the dynamics of settlement patterns between KA I and II, (3) to identify the causes (environmental, social, economic) of this deep transformation between KA I and II and the reasons for the subsequent cultural fragmentation. The project adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that combines archeology, bioarchaeology (paleobotany, zooarchaeology, isotopic analysis), paleoenvironmental and climatic reconstruction, spatial, statistical, and Bayesian analyses. In addition, the use of advanced analytical methods (micromorphology, use-wear analysis, residue analysis, pXRF, LA-ICP-MS, infrared spectroscopy, isotopic analysis, GDGTs), which are not yet widely used in Armenia, will allow a critical review of existing knowledge. HOMELAND combines current data from ongoing excavations and old data from literature or unpublished collections (museums, institutes). Our research will therefore generate a substantial amount of data that will be managed by a geodatabase called "DataKA". The latter will allow the storage, harmonization, management, analysis, and mapping of these data. The main interest will be to provide a multiscalar, diachronic, and thematic overview of the chrono-cultural evolution of the KA phenomenon on the territory of Armenia and beyond. The HOMELAND project gathers partners with longstanding experiences in the archaeology and paleoenvironment of the South Caucasus and relies on a solid network of local collaborations.

Contrary to its immense historical impact on the cultures of the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean, the Achaemenid Empire (539-331 BC) has been difficult to grasp archaeologically outside its centres, the impressive monumental complexes of Persepolis, Susa and Pasargadae. This is particularly surprising given the historic and epigraphic evidence for the existence of a very tight-knit, efficiently organized administration. Wherever major Achaemenian sites outside Iran had been investigated, it appeared that religious practices, local power structures and pre-existing customs were respected and adapted in a deliberate attempt at cooperative rule. During the past 15 years, the implementation of survey projects benefiting from technological advances in landscape archaeology (especially in geophysics) led to new archaeological discoveries that have changed this picture. Firstly, in the centre of the empire, the extent and internal structure of centres like Pasargadae and Persepolis is now much better understood thanks to the extensive application of combined survey methods and targeted excavations. The impressive monuments from these two sites are only the visible remains of cities loosely distributed within a landscaped environment made up of gardens and parks. Secondly, in a peripheral corner of the empire, the Southern Caucasus, administrative complexes were found which bear all hallmarks of ‘Iranian Achaemenid’ monumental architecture, from building standards to the physical organization of the landscape. Taken together, this suggests that the Achaemenids did create and export within their realm a fundamentally new way of representing rulership, by managing space on an unprecedented scale and creating new imperial landscapes. Their ‘paradises’ were at the same time luxurious residences with spacious gardens and administrative centers, playing an important role for the control of the dependent territories. In order to pursue this theory, five geographically and hierarchically differentiated centres of the Achaemenid Empire have been selected for study: Pasargadae, the foundation of Cyrus the Great, and two still underexplored secondary sites, Borazjan and Farmeshgan, in Iran. Karacamirli, a major centre recently brought to light in the Republic of Azerbaijan and Gumbati, a contemporary complex in Georgia. They will be investigated by a German-French team and its partners with archaeological, geophysical and geomorphological methods. Our project is organized around complementary tasks, with the objective of a comprehensive reconstruction of Achaemenid landscaping in its centres of power in order to better understand their functioning. Existing capabilities will be shared among project partners, with the aim of advancing the interpretive possibilities of archaeological landscape studies.