 So today I'm presenting this case study from this region together with Dominique Alias, who couldn't be here, who's a senior lecturer at the University of Rennes in France. So the idea of this project comes from very far away. So we started in 2008 as a group of young researchers and students from various universities to work together in this site in the Poudre Dome, the district of Mural and Sanicterre that are two very, very nice villages, very known for cheese, for example. And we started this project with a lot of people with different interests as a sort of joint venture, both from a scientific and a personal point of view. And we ended up creating a sort of multidisciplinary, more interdisciplinary environment. And I want to talk to you about what concerns the stones and specifically the building materials and the evolution of the use of building materials over time in this area, because in a way, it's a bit the core of this interdisciplinarity where all the different kind of data arrive at the end and database that we could build over time. So why the stones and why are we trying to tell stories about stone materials in this area? Because of course, like as I often say, like the story of humans is, in a way, carved in stones. It's something that takes and keeps the traces of human interactions and relationships. So in a way, what we often do, and Kathy was evoking as well, is try to provenance in the stones as materials themselves. So we try to link raw materials and sources. We try to link objects and where they come from, which is what we normally call provenance or provenance studies, which is like a bit different but I'm not going to go into the details, and which is what often happens when we try to study like objects in a certain moment of time, a bit frozen in history. But I would say that more than trying to link in like sources with sites, we should try to create a narrative of these stones in the sense that we should try to reconstruct the different steps of movements that these stones, like these materials do, like from the quarry moment or in the quarry itself, like as geological processes to the place where they are when we are looking at them. And yet their stories is not over because they will continue to be looked at and will continue to have like agencies that will just change over time. And in doing this, I normally use the concept of biography, the cultural biography of objects as it is theorized by Kopitov. It was theorized by Kopitov in 86. So the idea that things as humans can have biographies and we can actually trace their movement and the things that happen to them. And how do we do this? This is a bit tricky, right? Because if we want to create something more complex than a link from source to another place, then we have to find tools and techniques to trace these movements. And what I try to do, like in my PhD, is that I would like to trace this movement starting from the physical materiality of the objects. So try to describe which kind of traces and which kind of alteration they have and how they got these marks and what these marks means and trying to connect these physical, material properties to the stories that we can tell starting from this. So over time, we've pre-empted all batch of tools to map these materialities. And I don't want to go into details too much, but we try to overlap different systems from spectroscopy to have spectral imaging, analysis of the mortar, so photography, team sections, and then more traditional surveys and GIS database together with photogrammetry and all sorts of things to see actually which kind of tools can give us the data that we need to create these kind of narratives. But let's go to the stones, which are the object of our session. So this is a very poor quality geological map, but that's all we have. So as I was saying before, this region is a volcanic region. It's a quite young volcanic region, Overne. Like in the Poudre d'Orn, the last eruptions date to almost like 6,000 year BC. So it's very, very young, which makes that a lot of eruptions covered up already like some archaeological deposit. So we are waiting for some kind of prehistoric Pompeii, but yeah. So the thing is like it's so complicated, the geology of this area that we actually don't have a more detailed geological map. So this is what we have, and we have to deal with this and try to mind the gap with a lot of survey. So we work with geologists and we do a lot, a lot of field work, which is awesome because we can actually see these things in place and make up our mind and we can have an intuition of the data we are working with as well. But yeah, the Institute of the BRGM is working on the new geological map that we'll publish very, very soon, I hope. So what kind of stones do we have? Of course, like probably most of you are familiar with volcanic environment, but there is a whole range of outcrops and all the range of stones with very, very different physical properties. Going from basalt, for example, which is the hardest one. Basalt is very hard to cut. It's almost impossible to cut. So normally it's split along the natural joints. It's an extrusive rock. It's basically issued by the cooling lava coming out of the volcano. So what happens with basalt is that it's normally quarried locally. It's very difficult to cut, so we would just grab a block of stones and build something nearby. It's not transported usually. It doesn't travel a lot. And a wonderful example of the use of basalt is this castle, the castle of Mural, which is literally built in basalt and on basalt because it's on a plate of basalt that is like lining on a hill of clay. And you can see it here and here. You have, I don't know if you can see it. You have like small parts of the natural rock, the natural outcrop coming out. And actually the castle, it uses the natural rock as embankment and it's like kind of covered with like the masonry and it makes the castle looking bigger. So actually they use the natural rock to look like bigger and nastier. And it's completely black, of course, because this rock is very dark. And fun fact is that they completely painted, the castle was completely painted in white so that it could stick out in this area. Another type of rock, another type of lava, types of lava are trachea and trachea basalt, like changing on the type of minerals, according to the type of minerals they have in, but they are more soft rocks. It can actually be worked and are useful sculptures and more monumental buildings, like not that the castle is not, but like this church built in the 11th century, the church of Sannicterre. This is ahead of columns like in the church and this is an equestrian Roman statue. The photo is really bad, but it's the only one we got. And all these things are sculpted or the stone, sorry, our quarry from these outcrops and we have various type of quarries of this stone as it's very nice to work from open pits to like erratic blocks that are just quarried as they are. And then we have the pyroclastic rocks as a scoria, for example, and these rocks are very different because they're very soft, very easy to cut, but at the same time, not very resistant and we have different kind of features carved in this type of rock. For example, these like carved settlements in the middle age around the eighth century, there is a systematic operation of carving of these outcrops. Wherever there is pyroclastic rock, there is a cave and there are cleaved castles pretty much everywhere and the material that is carved out from this case, it's used locally. So for example, the village that is just down like close to this case is completely built with the rocks taken from the excavation. So we have like the castle in the cleave and the village down. And last but not least the limestone because the limestone of course, like in a volcanic environment, the sedimentary is very, very, very difficult to find. So all these monuments of course need mortar and in order to get mortar, you need limestone. So people would go, we found in the texts in the written sources that in the 15th century, they would go all the way to Clemensal from here to get the limestone, which is like something like eight kilometers, which is quite a lot. So we decided to put all this information in a database in the GAS environment of course. We try to use QGIS because you wanna be open but it's quite tricky when it comes to database. So we try to use of course like the cell, the core of our database is the sides and then to this we connect all the other like a research access that we have and mine in particular is bonded to the part talking about the geology of geomorphology of the sides and of course we added something about the building materials because this is fundamental to try to see the network. And in the building materials, we try to specify the chronology, a description of the stone masery, the type of material, the size of the block, the tools used, which kind of technique were used and some analytical data if we have, we're trying to connect the analytical part. So this is connected to the typology, the Zaurus about the typology of the sides includes quarries. So we can also identify the quarry sites and then we try to link in this way the building material to the quarries and these passing by the road network. That is just overlapped for the moment or we try to link it with some kind of network analysis. So what happens is that we have a mess. We have a lot of sites, lots of roads. I'm sorry, the legends are in French because of the bases in French but you can see these small squares are the quarries and we have like quarrying sites pretty much everywhere and then a lot of different sites built where we can identify materials. So from these like massive amount of data we are trying to get out some short stories and then that's the case for example of the prehistoric materials. We have a lot of minute endowments that are usually like made in stones that could be found nearby. So like volcanic rocks, but for example, all the tools that have been collected by villagers in time are made of, often made of other type of stones that are coming from a road. And that's also the reason why the villagers picked up like this stone axis because they were different from the type of rocks that they could see. So we have like for that tiny one is Chateaude coming from Alps. So that's one interesting thing and that's for the antiquity. The things change radically because we have like few built sites built on local stones but we have an interesting phenomenon that is the rise of the first systematic quarrying sites which is the site of Fars that we have identified with like a bunch of ancient quarries on the top of a hill a vicus, a village for quarrymen just close by. And then we have of course a modern quarry down here. Here there is like a carved settlement because this is like a pyroclastic rock and this is the plan of the caves and then there is probably another vicus down here. So it's the first like really organized system and it starts from the second century. And then of course like in the middle age things change radically again because we have a lot of built site with a lot of quarries and the relationship between built site and quarries shows that in the middle age they had a very precise knowledge of the geology of the environment and they would pick a very specific type of rock the closest one, the easier one to quarry and the perfect one for their need. So yeah, for example here I highlighted like the quarries used for the church and the castle and they are all nearby. So yeah, in conclusion because I'm running out of time I'm already more than 15 minutes but in conclusion I have a problem and it's also like a question that I would like to throw there for the discussion which is like we should probably talk more about scales. Scales of time and movement when we talk about rocks because of course like when we talk about durability of the materials and the fact that they make bridges between humans and something else. Humans and the God, humans and their past. We are also talking about different scales of durability of things because humans have another scale of durability than rocks and of course like these materials that are like apparently unchanged make, create bridges with other worlds but it's not, I mean stones are not unchanged are not still, we know that they change as well they just change at another rate. So we should try to understand this and probably discuss it because I think it could be a very interesting point like a very interesting note for our stone studies and also like the scales of the stories we can tell because of course we can go from a very big pictures to the very detailed storytelling and how do we choose which stories we wanna tell and how we decide how far the stone can go in a sense. And that's it.