 Good morning and welcome to you all for this session dedicated to urban gearcheology, which is in co-organization with Barbara Lothis, Rovina, Ranevi, Kanta Borri and Cristiano Nicoccia. Now why did we organize this session? Well over the last decades, gearcheology in towns and cities has experienced a series of important developments and what we see is that from the first pioneering studies on gearcheology has shown to be particularly rewarding to address issues of site stratigraphy and this is basically a key challenge in urban archaeology where archaeologists are on a daily basis confronted with this kind of stratigraphies often meters of thickness and which are quite complex to deal with and the challenge here are not only to decipher the succession of these deposits and the identification of eventual gaps within the sequence but also to understand the processes that are involved in the formation of this urban stratigraphy. Now a very well known example of this is the urban dark earth which is quite ubiquitous all over Europe and it's basically take seemingly homogeneous deposits and what happens is that gearcheological studies have permitted to demonstrate that this kind of deposits is basically the result of a complex interplay of human activities and natural events instead of just a simple dump of material. Now beyond the more and more systematic application of earth science methods and we think here about geomorphology, geology, pathology, so chemistry, so physics, micomorphology and so on and this during the investigation of the individual sites we also witnessed the development of a solid methodological framework and this can in fact be witnessed by the coming out of a series of doctoral dissertations dedicated to urban gearcheology and also by an almost ceaseless list of synthesis publications articles and books. I will be showing you some recent examples but there are many more. Now a series of research access are explored and examples of this are of course dealing with the origins of towns, the evolution of town topography, site biographies, the use and organization of space, human activities, pollution and waste management, growth of development within towns etc etc. Now what we basically see is a situation over Europe differs quite greatly. In some regions gearcheology is systematically applied within towns. Examples of this are Brussels, but also in France there are towns like Evre, Bavé, Lyon and a few more examples where it's systematically done. In other regions it's still quite rare so it differs a lot. It also differs sometimes because in some counties it's mostly developer land, in other counties it's mostly about academic research so things differ quite a lot and also the teams at Ardres can differ greatly. But there are some common things and one of the things which is quite commonly studied all over Europe is for example this dark earth. On this map you can see examples of countries where such dark earth has been studied and published and another team which is quite common all over Europe is the study of micro-certified layers which are often concerning ancient floors and occupation levels. Now what's the aim of this session? Basically it's to discuss the actual position of gearcheology within the framework of urban archaeology and some of the questions that we raised is basically how can we take our discipline further? What are the teams that are very more attention? How can we optimise the integration of urban gearcheology and what about interdisciplinary approaches? Are we doing enough? Are we really working on an interdisciplinary way? So these are the teams that we would like to address during this session. Now you may have noticed that there's plenty of time for discussion at the end of this first part of the session and also at the end so we'll maybe try to stick the discussion to these parts and just one more practical thing. The organiser asked us to be very strict on the timetable so we prepared some small gadgets. This one indicating that there's five minutes left. This one is only one minute left and if you see appearing this one it means you're running out of time so try to avoid this one. Okay, so I'll leave the stage to our first presentation.