How did exchange networks work during the Early Iron Age? Research on the interactions among Protohistoric societies is mostly focused on the elites and their ostentatious manifestations, exemplified by luxury imports and valued items. Indeed, during the first Iron Age – Hallstatt D –, exchanges substantially increased, thus promoting the rise of a dynamic system of long-distance network and enabling the dissemination of a wide range of raw materials and finished items across Europe. Partly linked with the growth of Mediterranean, Greek and Etruscan trade, these exchanges also favoured the dissemination of practices, symbols, as well as artistic manifestations across cultural boundaries. In this framework, because of the unusual nature of some of the imported artefacts, found away from their places of origin, studies on the subject have long been rooted to a “Mediterranean imports’ paradigm”, reducing the interactions to a mere prestige issue among Celtic, Italic and Mediterranean elites. However, this perception of the society hides a more complex reality, keeping ordinary people and their productions out of the picture. As illustrated by recent research in Northern Italy and France, the archaeology of interactions shall not be solely focused on a single class of objects, a single social class, or even a single cultural area, notwithstanding how rich may that be. To overcome these imbalances, the ITINERIS project focuses on daily objects (ornaments), their makers and dissemination patterns, adopting a strong continental and technological perspective. Thus, the characterization of Nord-italic bronze metalwork, a topic still poorly known, is the new paradigm structuring the investigation of cultural interactions and a multilevel model of the Protohistoric trade in the early Iron Age. The study of daily objects, features and technical traits, from both empirical and social perspectives, would lead to a contextualised understanding of artisanal, economic and cultural practices within a broader narrative about life-styles and (trans)-actions of European Iron age communities. Combining different methodological approaches used in Humanities, Physics, Chemistry and Computational Sciences, this project shifts the traditional paradigm pointing out the definition of metalwork traditions as a new key to a critical review of cultural interactions, emphasizing the role of artisans in Protohistoric transfers and their involvement in the process of cultural identity formation. Based on a wide dataset of bronze items from settlements belonging to three different cultural areas – Golasecca, Liguria and West Emilia – interacting with each other and involved in large-scale trade, this project will set out to rethink European interactions as a complex system of interconnected workshops operating at different social levels. It is a new reading of the social reality that is targeted by this global revision and socio-economic modelling of archaeological data; it is also the notion of import that is being tested here to deeply explore the social-cultural reasons that moved objects, practices, and fashion trends across Europe. Building on a technological approach and promoting an interdisciplinary analytic strategy, ITINERIS will be able to achieve a better cultural and anthropological understanding of Iron Age ancient societies, also taking part in the current debates on human mobility, and on dynamics of cultural integration and rejection.

Miletus on the western coast of Turkey has been an important megapolis of the ancient Mediterranean. It is now a central place for research on ancient urbanisation, as it offers an ideal case for the study of the genesis of a big city perfectly integrated into Mediterranean networks. Field research however has until now concentrated on particular parts of the settlement from the Bronze age to Archaic times, and on the monumental centre of the post-classical city. The aim of the present project is, on the reverse, to provide a thorough study of the dynamics of settlement development beyond the central public places, in a long-term perspective, from the Late Bronze age to the end of the Roman Empire (from circa 1400 BC to circa 400 AD). In the framework of a cooperation between the ENS Paris and Hamburg University, the specific forms of life in a big city will be explored on three different scales : the houses and their immediate environment, the global structure of the settlement, and the relations between the megapolis and the neighbouring region. The absence of a modern occupation on the site enables us to plan a whole series of interdisciplinary archaeological investigations, which will converge into an appropriate study of each context according to its peculiarities. We notably plan, basing on the results of geophysical prospections which took place in the last years, precise soundings in different parts of the site to reconstruct the spatial and temporal dynamics of settlement history, as well as excavations providing case studies on spaces lying outside, or far from, the centre. Study of the material will shed light on domestic equipment but also on vegetal and animal remains. Precious information will be gained through the exploitation of data from contexts from earlier excavations. A GIS will integrate all existing data sets, which can be complemented by a reconstruction of the coastal line based on recent geomorphological investigation and by a Digital elevation model currently being build. All data will be placed on a GeoServer with differentiated access for participants to the project, for interested colleagues and for the wider audience. The results will be the subject of a vast monography. This project, generally, aims at a contribution to our knowledge oft he forms of life in a bug city in Ancient times through the example of Miletus..

CAECINA Contacts and Acculturation in Classical Etruria: Images, Notions, Artefacts Only in the VII century BC did Etruscan society truly took shape, in connection with the intensification of commercial relationships between Central Italy and the Oriental and Greek worlds; from that moment, and until its disappearance in the I century BC, it can be caracterized both by a very high openness to foreign influences, and by a very high level of originality. In order to reach a better understanding of that highly exceptional phenomenon, and the way it worked, we have chosen to divide our project into four research areas. 1. Territory and boundaries The study of Etruscan territory and society has been too often artificially divided between northern and southern components, for reasons depending both on Etruscan historiography, and on modern administrative divisions of this territory. The creation, for this region, of an original tool, already successfully developed elsewhere, the Atlas de l’Âge du Fer, should help us to understand the evolution of the Etruscan culture as a whole. The excavation of an exceptional Etruscan/Hellenistic rock-cut tomb will allow us to increase our knowledge of an important source of social change, contact with Macedonia and Asia Minor, during a key-period of the Etruscan history. Finally, the study of the boundaries of the Etruscan peoples, hitherto very hypothetically drawn, both in historiography and in their historical reality, will allow us to go further in the study of the influence of the Italic peoples – Ligurians, Umbrians, Sabines and Latins...– who had close contacts with the Etruscans. 2. Celtic and Etruscan societies However, some of the major sources of changes in the Etruscan society came not from autochtonous people, but through contacts with the Celtic tribes who came to settle, at various successive periods, chiefly in Northern Italy, and particularly in an area which Etruscans had dominated for a long time, Emilia-Romagna and the Marche. Therefore, this region offers a very important field for the analysis of cultural and anthropological phenomena, in a melting pot which mixed autochtonous people, Etruscan and Celtic cultures. Close study of this interface should throw light on its consequences for the evolution of the Etruscan culture. In particular, we will study the aristocracies of this society on the boundaries. 3. Harbours and landing places The coast, another boundary, represents a fundamental buffer zone which has not so far been thoroughly studied in the context of the processes of ancient contact and exchange, and their consequences on the evolution of the Etruscan society. Therefore, we intend to study it through a detailed case-study : the coast and ports of the major Etruscan metropolis of Caere, which was precociously involved in exchanges with the Mediterranean world, at very impressive scale; later, the foundation of various Roman colonies in this very area caused deep transformations in rural and urban society. 4. The evolution of Etruscan language This field, highly transversal, is intended as strictly interdependant on the other three. We will try to understand better the metamorphoses of the Etruscan society in two different ways : a purely linguistic approach, in order to bring into focus the nature and intensity of contacts between Etruscans and other Italic or Celtic people and their linguistic consequences, and a study of the Etruscan vocabulary of social relationships, whose evolution can help us to understand the modifications connected with these contacts, and, subsequently, with the Roman conquest. Through these diversified approaches, using the combination of concrete case-studies with broader archaeological investigations, as well as seminars and colloquia, should give usa new and enriched vision of the question of the rise, evolution and final disappearance of Etruscan culture and society.

The Celtic, Etruscan, Italic and Phénico-punic cultures did not leave us literary sources concerning the funeral rites. Their knowledge is allowed thanks to various iconographic, epigraphic and especially archaeological approaches which were gradually organized with the contribution of the new developments of the archaeology funeral. The archebotanic and the archeozoology supply fundamental data on essential constituents of the rite: the bloody and non-bloody sacrifice (the biological offerings in graves and their immediate environment). Due to their nature, more visible than seeds and fruits, the animal bones were very early studied in funeral context. On the other hand, the presence of rests of plant food, carpet of flowers, coniferous substances or incenses, determined thanks to micro and macro rests is more delicate to bring to light. It's the same for residues preserved in recipients. Besides, hardly few studies were realized on the non-bloody offerings in the frame chronological geography chosen. A large-scale analysis on the nature and the reasons of the deposit of biological offerings been lacking totally. Harmful situation, at first by the wealth of information that this type of studies brought for Roman period to the knowledge of the rites for simply a decade and then because the methods of investigation are reliable and easy to implement. On the other hand, an important category of funeral offerings remains mostly invisible for the archaeologists; the amorphous organic materials, produced solid or fluids contained in recipients which, by anthropological action and natural phenomenon(fall of the vase in the grave, intervention of sediments, chemical change in time) seems to have totally disappeared. chemical and genetic technics allow to identify the original materials from their chemical markers or from fragments of sequences DNA, partially preserved. The appeal to these technologies is still relatively rare. Indeed, the obtaining of positive and exploitable results depends on numerous parameters that the archaeologists cannot always master; only an interdisciplinary work can guarantee the relevance of the studies. The objective of the program MAGI is to set up an interdisciplinary approach combining various methods of excavations, takings and analyses of the visible and invisible rests of organic products preserved in the grave. At first, a stratigraphic excavation of the whole grave but also inside of the recipients combining size grading, sieving and macrophotocrafic shots will on one hand allow to encircle the nature of the various coats observed and on the other hand to select the takings for identifications of the botanical and ichthyologic rests. Secondly, will be selected, if necessary, materials and recipients (by the invisible impregnations of their walls) for physico-chemical and genetic analyses allowing the precise identification of the residues and contained. This combined, crossed and treated on a hierarchical basis approach of the various methods and the techniques will be possible thanks to the collaboration of eight teams of research and a wide panel of complementary disciplines. It will allow to exploit at best the archaeological, biological and mineralogical data of the contents of the archaeological recipients, in a frame of collaboration pluri-and interdisciplinary. Three seminaries will be organized as well as a colloquium of the end of program presenting all the results. The MAGI program will give rise to three publications (the acts of the colloquium, a catalog of exhibition and an on-line database), to a workshop of doctoral formation in Rome (French School of Rome: it will concern the potentialities and the limits offered by the botanical, zoological, chemical and genetic analyses of the organic products), two workshops of specialist training (the one in France in Mont-Beuvray, the other one in Italy in Naples) addressing the professionals of the archaeology, and the exhibition in the museum of Lattes.

The necropoleis and the great tumuli of Pergamon and the Eolian cities of Kyme and Elaia represent a priceless archaeological heritage for understanding the political, social and cultural dynamics in a key region of Hellenistic Asia Minor. They offer a wide range of sociological and historical contexts: on the one hand they provide information on every stratum of the society, from the Attalid princes and the prosperous citizens to the more modest section of the population; on the other hand, the studied area offers a large variety of political, social and cultural situations: the residential city of Pergamon, Kyme (the heart of Eolid, which long remained under the Seleucid control), and Elaia (both an Eolian city and the naval base of Pergamon). This situation gives an ideal background to approach a series of questions that are under discussion in the scholarly milieu: 1. The structure of the society through the funerary practices and behaviors; 2. The transformation of the forms of the urban ideological representations under the influence of the Hellenistic kingship; 3. The cultural impact of the interactions between the capital of the Attalid kingdom and the autonomous poleis; 4. The transformation of local identities and the circulation of ideological models from the Hellenistic Kingdoms in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Following the most recent research, our aim is to approach the funerary behaviors as a subtle and complex expression of the social, cultural and religious habitus that need to be tackled through new historical problematics and considered through their great diversity, both locally and regionally. In order to renew such approaches one first has to reconsider the archaeological documentation produced since the 1880s and create a collaborative French-German program with the teams already working in this area: the German archaeological mission of Pergamon and the French archaeological mission in Eolid. The project aims at developing a common strategy in order to enhance the exploitation of scientific data by combining the most innovative aspects of French and German research in funerary archaeology. Our goal is to constitute an interdisciplinary French-German team that will be capable of intervening throughout this three-years project based on different sites of the region and that will also be able to develop collaboration with the other Turkish and foreign archaeological missions. The case studies are the urban necropoleis of Elaia and Kyme, as well as the large tumuli of Pergamon and Kyme. A series of common methods will be applied by the main French-German-Turkish team, including but not limited to: - Remote sensing, geophysical and geoseismic survey; - Excavation of strategic areas, chosen after the result of the surveys, in the necropoleis and among the large mounds; - Double program of funerary anthropological studies (archaeo-thanatology and biological anthropology) and archaeometry analyses (physico-chemical and paleo-genetical) on unearthed remains; - Concerted archaeological, epigraphic, iconographic and architectural studies; - Global and joint archaeological and historical processing and interpretation of the achieved results. Fieldwork and laboratory analyzes will be accompanied by an interdisciplinary practical and theoretical training program for French, German, Turkish and foreign PhD students. The collaborative work will result in annual interdisciplinary meetings. The dissemination of the results will be carried out through joint publications of the preliminary reports and monographies, an international colloquium at the end of the program and a specific website dedicated to the ANR/DFG project. The conservation and the long-term presentation of the data will be operated by the iDAI-field system.