This project is a development of previous investigations carried out respectively in Azerbaijan, on the salt mine of Duzdagi and the settlement of Ovçular Tepesi, and in Georgia, on the gold mines and related landscape of Sakdrissi/Dzedzvebi. Our research programme will take place in two regions: 1) the Naxçivançay valley in Azerbaijan (Nakhchivan); 2) the Mashavera valley in Georgia. Our work will concentrate on the early mining and associated mining economy of salt and gold, but also copper, since major copper mines (Misdagi) are attested in Nakhchivan in the vicinity of the Duzdagi, together with several Late Prehistoric settlements. The main objectives of this project will be to study the conditions (social, economic, technological, environmental) that presided over the development of early mining in the Caucasus (salt, copper and gold), with a special focus on the reasons why early mining was so intimately linked to the Kuro-Araxes cultural complex. Our goal is to complete the information so far retrieved from the mines themselves (Duzdagi and Sakdrissi) by data to be obtained from the miners’ settlements (Kültepe I and Dzedzvebi), especially as concerns technology, socio-economic structures and subsistence strategies. In Nakhchivan, work on early mining and the mining economy will be extended to the copper mines of Misdagi and the coppersmiths’settlement of Zirinçlik. In both Georgia and Azerbaijan, archaeological excavations and surveys will be associated with specific environmental studies in order to complete our data on subsistence strategies. Another aim of these studies will be to reconstruct the environmental setting in which these new technologies (mining, metallurgy) developed. Isotope analyses carried on animal teeth (caprines) will also help to assess the nature of pastoral herding (local/long-distance) and provide indirect clues to the intensity of interregional exchange (goods, animals, people). The extension of the mining economy, as well as the impact of new technologies upon surrounding regions, will also be studied through provenance studies on gold and copper artefacts from Caucasian sites (Ovçular Tepesi, Kültepe I, Zirinçlik, Dzedzvebi, Soyuk Bulaq, Sioni) but also from Eastern Anatolia (Arslantepe) and Northwestern Iran (site ?). Several operations are planned: in Nakhchivan, work will be divided into excavations and surveys: 1) excavations on the salt mine of Duzdagi, inside the tunnels; 2) excavations on the miners’ settlement of Kültepe I (1 ha); 3) excavations on the coppersmiths’ settlement of Zirinçlik (0,2 ha); 4) surveys on the copper mine of Misdagi. All these sites are known for their significant remains of Kuro-Araxes exploitation or settlement. In Georgia, work will focus on Dzedzvebi, which is an outstanding settlement (60 ha) located on a plateau at the foot of the Sakdrissi gold mine. Previous, small-scale excavations on this site have yielded Kuro-Araxes graveyards, workshop-areas related to gold-processing, as well as domestic quarters. Emphasis will be laid on the reconstruction of the chaîne opératoire through experimental studies and the econometrics of gold production, in order to assess the quantity of excavated gold. In this project, Kültepe I/Duzdagi represents an earlier (ca. 4500-3800 BC), Zirinçlik/Misdagi an intermediate (ca. 4000-3500 BC) and the Maschavera group a later step (ca. 3400-3000 BC) of the Kuro-Araxes culture and its mining development. Beside archaeological operations, the coring of marshy areas both in Georgia and Azerbaijan should provide mineralogical and organic proxies (insects, pollens, molluscs) in order to document the interactions between the evolution of the climate, the vegetation cover and pastoral herding. These operations will be completed by the study of the erosion/accumulation sequences within the embedded watersheds of the Naxçivançay, the Arpaçay (Nakhchivan) and the Mashavera rivers (Georgia).

This project aims to study the socio-economic and environmental adaptation strategies of civilizations in a context of multifactorial upheavals that could lead to the collapse. Echoing the difficult situations that our contemporary society faces, the project will investigate an emblematic but still poorly documented case, the disappearance in Central Asia of the Oxus civilization and the formation of the Sine Sepulchro cultural complex during the transition between the Bronze and Iron Ages (around 1500 BCE). While the search for direct causes of this disappearance is currently inconclusive, this project aims to question societal transformations by focusing on the processes of adaptation during this transition and the period that followed (2nd half of the 2nd mill. BCE). The strategies implemented appear to have been successful, since the Early Iron Age was characterized by an extreme stability for five centuries. This pivotal period, however, remains little studied because it was long considered a period of decline caused by “barbarian invasions”. In order to contribute to a better understanding of the interactions between human societies and their environment during this transition, the TransOxus project intends to question societal resilience at the local level. It will focus on a recently discovered settlement area in southern Uzbekistan, the Kayrit oasis. It is unique for several sites dating from this transition period have been recorded there, which constitute the only known settled complex in an altitude area and in proven contact with cultures from the steppe of northern Central Asia, which certainly played a role in this phenomenon. This multidisciplinary project will combine archaeology, bioarchaeology, geophysics, geography and GIS. It is organized around two main axes and is based on three field missions and a significant laboratory analyses component. The first axis will aim to document and diachronically characterize the material culture and settlements of the Kayrit Oasis, and will include geophysical surveys on the identified sites, archaeological soundings, and study of material production. These studies will contribute to our understanding of settlement type, land occupation, material culture and socio-economic practices. They will provide a reliable chronological framework that will also be supported by a radiocarbon dating program. The second research axis will aim at reconstructing agricultural practices and the relationship of the oasis’ inhabitants with their environment. Archaeobotanical studies (analyses of botanical macro-remains, phytoliths, isotopes) will aim to document the interaction between man and plants. Geoarchaeological and geographical studies will reconstruct the ancient environment and evaluate existing resources and constraints, document subsistence and exploitation strategies (cultivated areas, gardens or livestock parks), and identify and date irrigation networks. They will be based on prospecting and auger drilling, as well as sediment analyses (grain size analyses, organic matter and calcium carbonate rates, OSL and C14 dating). Particular attention will also be paid to current agricultural practices in mountain areas, which are still very traditional. All the data obtained as well as those available in the scientific literature on other types of neighbouring sites (petroglyphs, kurgans) will be integrated into a geographical information system, allowing multiscalar data to be read and queried at site and oasis level and beyond.

Faced with the real estate and infrastructure development in many countries, it is important to implement strategies to be able to understand the earliest possible issue of the study and preservation of heritage, taking into account the administrative and legal specificities which supervise the operations of preventive archaeology in different countries. The non-EU countries have not signed the Convention of Malta (except Turkey), or equivalent agreement: preventive archaeology then suffers a considerable delay compared to western countries. This often push the local services of Antiquities which have in charge the emergency excavations - and sometimes with little human and financial resources- to look after optimized tools for heritage management which help them to prevent new real estate or infrastructure projects in poorly known areas. In this context, exploration by geophysical methods, coupled with other methods of archaeological survey, is a crucial preliminary approach for the management of archaeological heritage. The objective of the Joint Laboratory GEO-HERITAGE is to develop tools offering to the services in charge of heritage protection an appropriate protocol analysis to evaluate the environmental and archaeological potential of a site or given regional area. Called to be used in very different environmental, geographical and geological contexts, the developed package must be able to integrate different sources of data from the archaeological survey (geophysical and geomorphological reconnaissance, aerial and pedestrian survey) while allowing mobility, easy setup and rapid implementation. A first line of research will focus on mechanical and ergonomic optimization of equipment used and the data acquisition systems, particularly in geophysics. This will increase the mobility and performance of existing geophysical equipment by creating towed systems adapted to different ground conditions. The design of a universal acquisition interface, adaptable to different methods of geophysical survey, will allow simplified management of data as well as making simultaneous measurements in the case of a multi-methods surveys. The acquisition of large amounts of data will also require the development of specific software for the automation of data processing protocols and automatic detection of relevant information on geophysical images. A second line of research will focus on the development of a unified use and extensive exploitation of different sources of data (i.e. geophysical, geomorphological and archaeological data). This complementary approach, especially for geophysical and geomorphological results, will return to the most informative state of a site - or a set of sites- in its environment. The integration of comparable metadata within a open source GIS (like QGIS by instance) will require the development of appropriate plug-ins protocols. The ultimate goal is to have a package of tools and protocols for environmental and archaeological reconnaissance in agreement with the need for a better management of heritage.

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".

For the past 50 years, the research on Ancient Arabia has been extremely dynamic and a considerable amount of data was made available. However, tools for their analysis are still lacking and syntheses have to be written. This observation is the prime mover behind the MAPARABIA project. The objective of the project is to model territorial and cultural dynamics of Ancient Arabia by crossing archaeology and textual sources, in order to enhance the production of a renewed regional history from the beginning of the first millennium BC to the 7th century AD. Many issues regarding the Pre-Islamic Arabian Peninsula are to be addressed: the settlement and urbanization process in an arid environment; the nature and evolution of religious practices; the adoption of Judaism, Christianity and their impact on the origin of Islam; the languages and writings, for their intrinsic values as much as for their significance as markers of identity; the socio-political organization of Arabia and its evolution. The approach purports to be global and societal. By addressing these topics, the ambition is to highlight the origins of Pre-Islamic literate societies and their evolution until the major transition to Islam. This way, the project is addressing most of the challenges and themes from the ANR 2018 work programme (section B8 – Axis 5: Cultures, création, patrimoines). The project encompasses a variety of fields of research: history, archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics, palaeography, geomatics, and geography. Fifteen specialists of these disciplines form the consortium and come from four of the major laboratories dedicated to pre-Islamic Arabia: Orient & Méditerranée (UMR8167, Paris); Archéorient (UMR5133, Lyon); Dipartimento di Civiltà e Forme del Sapere (University of Pisa); and ISMA (CNR, Rome). The purpose is to create a close collaboration bewteen the French developers of several archaeological and epigraphic databases and the Italian team managing the DASI archives, a key project in the field of digital humanities and epigraphy. The method consists in gathering, extracting, homogenizing, mapping and analysing data through a semantic and spatial approach. A major interest of the method is to highlight the long-term variations of the spatial distribution of many cultural phenomena. This way, processes such as emergence, spread, acculturation, adoption, adaptation, shrinking, decline will be made visible and their analysis possible. The project is divided into four work packages, each ending up in a specific output: the development of a digital geobase and an on-line Geographic Information System devoted to the mapping of settlement and cultural features in Arabia (WP1); the development of an on-line Knowledge Organization System in the shape of a gazetteer of place names (WP2); the production of a Historical Atlas of Ancient Arabia (WP3); the development of a digital Thematic Dictionary of Ancient Arabia (WP4). The development of tools for the analysis and the synthesis of data collected in the frame of past projects shall provide support to illustrate and promote the recent radical shifts of paradigm in the historical knowledge of the region, and to arouse new ones. The project will benefit from the resources of the TGIR Huma-Num and will meet the requirements on open access concerning data and publications. Through the constitution of a perennial, interoperable archive structured in three repositories (geobase, gazetteer, dictionary) and a website as the main agent for the dissemination of this archive (webmapping module; Thematic Dictionary module), the project will impact both the specialists of our fields of research, and the wider academic community by providing ease of access to critical sources for the understanding of the Ancient World and the emergence of Islam.