Sharing and reuse of archaeological or historical data: a RDF-based description according to semantic web repositories and standards The HisArc-RDF project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium: archaeology, history, geography, terminology, bibliography and informatics. The pooling of experiences, based on the sharing and articulation of methods and software and semantic tools developed in each discipline, will make it possible to prototype (implementation and iterative tests) a "FAIR" operating chain on structurally and semantically heterogeneous archaeological and historical data sets: - to write a data management plan (DMP) for each dataset, based on the recommendations of the European Union and the french National Open Science Plan; - to develop two softwares : the first one operating a webservice between the OntoME tools (matching ontologies tool) designed by a community of historians and Opentheso (aligning thesauri tool) designed with a community of archaeologists; the second one creating a generic supervised automatic alignment interface between Opentheso and any semantic web repository; - to document each test set by a fine-grained processing chain, based on the use of microthesauri, descriptor concepts aligned with semantic web repositories, and then on the matching of the ontology expressed by the thesauri with the reference standards and ontologies of the documentary and scientific communities; thanks to the software developed, this phase will lead to a RDF-structured description of the test datasets; thus allowing, after online publication, the reporting and direct reuse ("calculability") of the datas; - to lead a wide network of historical and archaeological stakeholders (repository supports, multidisciplinary research groups, programmed and preventive archaeologies, European and non-European sites, academic and private stakeholders) through a training programme and experimental workshops, in order to disseminate the good practices supported and expressed by the operating chain and the tools developed during the project. The foundation of the HisArc-RDF project is threefold: a convergence of views born from the confrontation of multidisciplinary practices and experiences around the life cycle of data, from its acquisition to its publication, sharing and mediation; an acculturation of archaeological and historical communities to the practical and scientific challenge of aligning their vocabularies on semantic web core repositories; and finally the need for a processing chain capable of appropriation by these communities - i. e.i.e. as close as possible to business practices and work in the field and laboratories. The outcome of the project will be the realization and open publication of a methodology and associated tools in order to implement in our disciplines an ecosystem of "FAIR" data production, publication and sharing. It will be based on a proof of concept: the targeted user experience is the sharing and effective reuse of data extracted from recording systems (raw data), regardless of the structure specific to a particular database; it is the responsibility of each operating interface/visualization to pick them up and configure them to allow their reuse. The rapid implementation of these linked open data will be at the service of the widest possible academic audience: students, museums and research teams.

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 international consortium AquaTyr will investigate reticulated water management in the antique city of Tyre, in Lebanon, an island that became a peninsula. It will focus on coping strategies for water needs, from the Iron Age to Medieval times, before, during, after a period when water was delivered by a roman aqueduct. It will track the evolution of water intakes, management, and dispensing. Multidisciplinary investigations involving Archaeology, Architecture, History, Geomorphology and geochemical analyses will allow an in-depth study of the evolution of reticulated water grids over large timespans and spatial scales to capture the full range of usages (‘white’, ‘grey’, and ‘black’ waters; wells, water tanks, aqueducts, and associated city zoning), as well as their dynamic response to sea level rise, alterations to the island shape, and harbor relocation. This approach, which associates on land and offshore observations, is novel and can be transposed to other coastal cities. In addition, the project proposes a plan for the valorisation of results and training through research based on collaboration between Lebanese and French researchers.

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.

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.