PARCEDES aims to study the organisation and evolution of agrarian plots of land [“parcellaires” in French] from Protohistory to the present day, based on four French, Italian and English sites. The aim is to (i) identify and, if necessary, characterise the possible links between these changes and societal and/or geographical parameters, and (ii) propose a model of the observable phenomena of the resilience of field boundaries in the long term. Based on the advances of French archaeogeography, which evaluates the part of transformations and transmissions that affect the forms of landscapes, PARCEDES is an original project because it wishes to remove 3 scientific and methodological obstacles: (i) to solve the problem of the great dispersion and heterogeneity of the available data by starting from the morphological analysis of 19th-20th century plots visible on maps, cadastres and aerial photographs, and by building an exhaustive database of plot ditches found in excavations and preventive archaeological evaluations [“diagnostics”]; (ii) to go beyond local studies closed in on themselves by a comparative approach and a harmonised methodology; (iii) to improve our knowledge of terraced agrarian structures by dating 10 of them in Devon thanks to an innovative archaeometric method (OSL-Profiling & Dating). Finally, PARCEDES will endeavour to make a critical assessment of the data and disciplines mobilised. PARCEDES will be led by Magali Watteaux (university of Rennes 2) for 3 years, in collaboration with 3 archaeologists and 1 geomatics engineer. The work programme will be organised into 4 work packages and 16 tasks. WP1 (2022): acquisition of data complementary to those already available. The contribution requested from the ANR (€305,280) will make it possible to finance 1 database of archaeological ditches (Vendée, Nîmes, tasks 1, 3); 200 photo-interpreted shots of a 1976 aerial mission (Vendée, task 2); 24 vectorised section sheets of the ancient cadastre (Nîmes, task 4); 1 DTM by aero-photogrammetry (Tuscany, task 5); vectorisation of a part of the Lorenese cadastre (Tuscany, task 6); photo-interpretation of 5 aerial missions (Tuscany, task 7); realisation of 10 archaeological soundings in terraced agrarian structures from which 10 sedimentary samples will be taken for dating by OSL-PD (Devon, tasks 8-9). WP2 (2023): analyses and creation of a webGIS where the data produced will be made available in open access. WP3 (2024): syntheses, modelling of results, finalisation of the webGIS. WP4: in parallel, communication, dissemination (4 public lectures) and information actions will be carried out and 5 working meetings for the team. This collective work will result in 12 deliverables: 1 webSIG (on the TGIR Huma-Num), 1 report on Devon surveys, 6 publications (peer-reviewed journals), 3 information tools (Hypotheses.org booklet, Facebook page, Twitter account), 1 Data Management Plan. To be organised: 1 session at the EAA (Sept. 2023), 1 summer school (Jul. 2024), 1 closing conference (Dec. 2024). PARCEDES will contribute to revitalizing a field of research that is currently neglected in archaeology, almost abandoned in geography and little renewed in rural history. It will also contribute to (i) enhancing the value of preventive archaeological evaluations as research tools on agrarian spaces, (ii) the prescription work of regional archaeological services (France) by enriching the national archaeological database with predictive information for future operations. Finally, after the project, PARCEDES also envisages the mediation of the results with heritage managers and local stakeholders of management of contemporary territories because the plots are useful for thinking about the sustainability of development projects. At the coordinator's level, it will enable her to strengthen her research on plots of land, her collaborations with French archaeologists and her European network in view of future European projects.

In 1959, at the behest of emperor Haile Selassie, Unesco sent John Blower to Addis Ababa to guide the functioning of the Ethiopian national parks. Formerly a game warden in British Kenya, Blower wrote upon arrival that: "As democracy does not yet threaten Ethiopia, we can still save its nature". Over the course of the next fifteen years, Blower supervised the management and the implementation of the Ethiopian national parks and, in doing so, the expulsion of their inhabitants, who were considered detrimental to a once pristine and luxuriant African Eden, now overcrowded and deforested. The Ethiopian leaders, far from being helpless victims of a green neocolonialism, received the honor of seeing their parks classified as World Heritage Sites, and obtained the associated funding to impose them along the borders, the lands populated by nomads and the bush, i.e. in secessionist territories. Ethiopian documentation provides us with an ideal vantage point from which to examine and construct a global history of heritage programs. The same can be said for the archive funds identified by the other members of the PANSER-project. In Cambodia and Malaysia, two initially very different colonial policies converged, after independence, towards the adoption of similar international norms; however, the policies in Malaysia focused on concerted territorial management while conversely, in Cambodia, the policies were carried out by coercively controlling the local actors. For its part, the Congo case seems to be characterized by greater continuity. From the colonial era to the Democratic Republic, tensions between the elitist appropriation of hunting resources and the adaptations by the locals to the marginalization of native uses deeply marked the evolution of a global conservationism. Finally, in regions as diverse as Zanzibar, the Seychelles and Vietnam, research on protected areas suggests that, in 1900 as in 2017, European and American "heritage makers" have constructed global models of knowledge and government and imposed them on both nature and people by relying on the comings and goings between different African and Asian areas. These processes are a key point of focus for the project, which aims to investigate from 1900 to 2017 the trajectories of experts (foresters or agronomists, then biologists and experts, ecologists and consultants) who move from one natural space to another, as a way to build a global history of interventions upon environment and heritage. From Equatorial Africa to the South China Sea, focusing upon these interconnected histories in the relevant local territories aims at tracing from below the history of encounters, negotiations and struggles which paved the way, in the twentieth century, towards the construction of an Afro-Asian bio-heritage area. PANSER will be structured around individual works – each contributor will study his/her archives – and around collective research – the common study of these archives will lead to the construction of a comparative, connected study of an Afro-Asian region. Indeed, if this region is in essence heterogeneous, the circulation of scientists, experts, then consultants from national park to national park encourages its study as a territory in and of itself. Thus, this is the main objective of this project: to study different histories of heritage in order to build a small-scale, global history of natural heritage in the South. By intermingling field and archive work for 36 months, PANSER will culminate in the construction of an archive database, the training of a post-doctoral fellow, the organization of both an international symposium and a summer school, and the publication of both a special issue of an academic journal and of a synthetic book for a wider public. This history of the global invention of heritage should thereby allow us to think about the environment in the southern areas of the world in terms of adaptation rather than degradation.

The CURR project (Cultures of Revolts and Revolutions) is aligned with the latest research in social and human sciences about political cultures. The purpose of the project is to analyse the use of cultural productions – defined as any dissenting discourse getting media attention through writing, orality or iconography – and their means of communication and spreading in the course of revolts and revolutions. The study focuses on collective political uprisings that breach standards and established rules in early modern Europe throughout the process of construction of the Modern State, from the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Enlightenment. The covered period goes until 1799 in order to include the field of memory and the reuse of earlier uprisings in the context of the French Revolution in Europe. Six themes related to cultural productions and revolts are developed within the CURR project: words and gestures; iconography; propaganda, communication and spreading; public space and revolt; how to write revolts; memory and revolts. The aims of the project are to better understand how political norms can be collectively rejected in pre-industrial European societies, to analyse these phenomena through the confrontation between a wide range of sources and thus to improve the historical knowledge concerning cultural expressions in a context of revolts and revolutions. The CURR project is led by three French research centres (two UMR and one EA). 15 permanent French researchers, and 10 European researchers from 7 different countries are involved in it. The purpose is to strengthen and expand an international network working on the cultures of early modern revolts and revolutions while combining multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies according to various geographical experiences and different scales of analysis. The project is based on preliminary research started two years ago and materialised by several workshops, conferences and international seminars that allowed to test the first hypotheses, to gather a network of international experts and to clearly define the scientific objectives of the project now submitted to the ANR. The CURR project will lead to numerous and various scientific productions (seminars and conferences, published articles and books, participation to online journals, exhibitions and museum catalogue, website, educational productions) in French and in several other languages. These productions will help to renew, at an international level, the historical knowledge related to a political and cultural understanding of revolts and revolutions in early modern Europe.

ACTÉPI - French episcopal acta of the Middle Ages: a multi-media edition and analysis Keywords: History, Middle Ages, France, culture, written word, documentary practices, charters, diplomatics, bishops, chanceries, corpus, digital edition, multi-media publication Funding requested: 291 553,56 euros Project start: 1 January 2019 – Project end: 31 December 2022 Partners: CRAHAM (UMR 6573, Caen), POLEN (EA 4710, Orléans), CRULH (EA 3945, Lorraine), ARCHE (EA 3400, Strasbourg), TEMPORA (EA 7468, Rennes) ACTÉPI concerns the episcopal acta of northern France from the middle of the 11th century to the middle of the 13th. It has two main objectives: 1. In the first instance, it will bring together and edit the episcopal acta, currently scattered throughout various archives, of 25 dioceses (around 8000 acta in total), which, unlike in England, have been the object of little historical study in France (only 3 French collections of acta published, compared to 45 in England). Each act will be edited according to critical standards, and will be accompanied by dating information, a summary of the contents in French, a schema of the manuscript tradition, critical notes, and variants. Every edited act will then be encoded in XML-TEI using the E-Cartae program, which will allow for 25 collections to be published, from a single source file, both in print (via the Presses Universitaires de Caen) and online (via the E-Cartae website). One of the project’s aims is to increase the use of the TEI within the academic community. All person and place names mentioned in the acta will be identified and digitally indexed using external XML-TEI files (thesauri), which are those used by Equipex Biblissima and the COSME consortium (TGIR Huma-Num). ACTÉPI will, for the first time, bring together the qualitative approaches typical of critical editions and the quantitative methodology of a database in order to create reliable texts, which are accompanied by all the necessary contextual data. 2. ACTÉPI’s second objective is to use the digital editions of the 25 collections, which can be systematically searched and sorted, to shed light on various issues relating to religious history and that of the written word. The project will explore three lines of enquiry. The first looks to understand better the role played by episcopal chanceries in the documentary change of the long 12th century, which saw a shift from narrative forms to increasingly standardised acts. The external and internal characteristics of the acta will be studied in detail in order to identify those acts produced by the episcopal chanceries, which in turn will allow for the chronological development of the specific practices of these chanceries to be established. The second line of enquiry will attempt to identify the various networks and communities of which the medieval bishops of northern France formed a part. Conversely, it will also look to identify those with whom the bishops came into conflict. This will allow for a better understanding of the bishops’ reforming tendencies and power relations, not just within their diocese, but also their ecclesiastical province and the wider world. Those concepts that shed light on cooperative and hierarchical power structures will also be examined. The third line of enquiry, located at the intersection of the previous two, concerns the nature of documentary power, in particular the synergies and conflicts inherent in textual production, which emerged both within the diocese and the province at a time when societal needs were driving the creation of a market of the written word. The role played by episcopal chanceries in the production of documents for third parties will also be examined, by comparing and contrasting the 25 collections with other archives. The project will also include the creation of a research blog on hypotheses.org, the publication of a collection of translated sources, and an exhibition dedicated to the bishops of Normandy.

The history of Ancien Régime institutions has been ingrained with a century-long metanarrative of the construction of the modern State, which still impedes our understanding of the underlying mechanisms of its development. Despite an illusory resemblance in vocabulary, categories of the State and civil society that are natural to us were undoubtedly alien to contemporaries three centuries ago. Furthermore, our cognitive representations of what constitutes a political territory remain bounded by geographical projections that were only progressively defined over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. How, then, can we better understand the dynamic relationships of power that presided over and fostered the constitution of the modern State without relying on these inherited categories? To overcome these hurdles, we propose an innovative knowledge representation system of the dynamics of Ancien Régime institutions through the application of ontologies to historical data: the Ontology-based Ancien Régime Data Infrastructure (ObARDI). We will construct this infrastructure in four steps. First, we will assemble an extensive database of the local institutional, economic, and social environment of each of the former communes of 17th and 18th-century France—a layout that will serve as an interoperable matrix for Ancien Régime history. Second, we will integrate this data into a fully-structured information system through encompassing formal ontologies that will manage the geography of base territorial units, describe underlying source material and content, and provide source criticism tools to reinvent the historian’s laboratory. Third, we will render our infrastructure compliant with FAIR data management principles in a Linked Open Data perspective: it will be interoperable and accessible through an ergonomic web platform, which will constitute a tool in fostering the use of the digital humanities across various public. Finally, the resulting environment will enable us to create innovative cartographic tools to represent Ancien Régime territories as an evolving set of layered institutions which boundaries were structured by the relationships of power in their midst.