 So it is exactly two o'clock, which is a time when we are supposed to start. I am Wissac, I am one of the co-organisers. The other one is Professor Dragos Georgiu from Romania. I am French, but I am from Toronto, Canada. And we have decided to propose that session on history and prehistory of space. So I will make a very short introduction. And after that I will give my paper. And I apologize for having scheduled my own paper as the first one. Because I am not a real archaeologist. I am a share archaeologist. That is I just read and write, but I don't do digging. And after I am finished, then we can move to real archaeologists who really confront constantly the harshness of the archaeological record. So my first few words of introduction is to ask in what sense can we say that space changes with time and thus can be considered to have a history and a prehistory. This sounds at first paradoxical since for the modern mind, space appears to be an invariant of human experience, precisely what does not change with time, but within which changes occur. We assume that the experience of a three-dimensional space is a universal category of the human mind and this is undoubtedly true in as much as all life takes place in a physical environment. However, it is likely that this abstract concept of space is a cognitive elaboration that emerged in the western human consciousness with the advent of Euclidian geometry. This is a space reduced to three dimensions without gravity and without complexity that we project upon our environment like a net or a grid in order to objectively measure distances and evaluate surfaces when we endeavour to describe and interpret the archaeological record. Another source of our modern representation of space depends on the achievements of geography. It is easier indeed to conceive this aspect of space from the point of view of history because we can compare the maps that were produced over a long period of time for various practical purposes such as navigation, exploration and administration. Although maps cannot be confused with actual territories, signal progress was made during the last few centuries to reach a close approximation in the projection of two dimensions of Earth's morphology. Today's satellite photography allows us for high definition of details but what is gained in details is lost in terms of the global representation of general patterns and relations that are preserved in our semantic memory with various biases. I should put some slides now. Can you help me please? Can you help me here? We now imagine our planet as a set of five continents and thinking of the world today calls up images that are markedly different from what this representation was a thousand years ago or more. The archaeological record provides evidence of how space was experienced, conceived and represented up to a certain temporal threshold but not beyond. When archaeologists locate, describe and artifact in space, they necessarily rely on the contemporary epistemological toolkits of geometry, geology and geography as these points of view of our proximal and distal environment stand now. No data by itself can be correctly interpreted that is cognitively represented with some degree of plausibility in the absence of information about its context. Most often this information is of a spatial nature even social information as a proximic dimension. There is a constant danger of extrapolating our own modern experience of space when we reconstruct the spatial context of the archaeological record. This issue is still more pressing when we try to describe and understand hominine and human mobility. Early migrants were bound to have a radically different relation to space since it can be assumed that their experience was not mediated by the knowledge of any form of geopolitical maps compelling them to rely on other cognitive affordances of their immediate experience. Can we infer, imagine or simulate with any kind of plausibility the prehistoric experience, conceptualization and representation of space in order to better understand the archaeological record? This is the question that our session will attempt to tentatively answer from a range of timescales and from a variety of archaeological points of view. This is a question that has haunted archaeology at least since the landmark publication of the collective volume edited by Colin Renfrew and Ezra Zubro, the ancient mind element of cognitive psychology which I think is a landmark at the beginning of the start. At the time. At the time, yes, but you have to start somewhere, raising some questions. Can we reconstruct, can we imagine the mind of Palaeolithic people hominine? It's extremely important. And I must say that there is also another important article by Ezra a prehistoric space, an archaeological perspective which was published in the Journal of World Anthropology and I don't remember the date but it is probably contemporary to this book more or less to this book. So now I will come to my own presentation and once again I apologize for scheduling me at the beginning but once again it is because I am a armchair anthropologist and there are just a few remarks and after that we will move to the real.