 So mine is not going to be really a presentation, but more like an introduction and I'm just going to point out a bunch of different approaches and research questions that we have, probably all of us when working with hoaries and rock cat sites and I think maybe this point could be helpful to start a discussion later on and I'm sure that a lot of the questions of the points that I'm going to make are going to be answered or you're going to talk about those much more than I can do in this very short introduction. Something I wanted to remind you, if some of you hasn't done it yet, here is the list of the names of the presentation for the video recording, so if you are to present and haven't signed yet, please do it. You can agree or disagree with the recording because we are still missing some people, but not so many, great. All right, so I decided to type on this small introduction using a quote from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice because I really like this quote, I think it's very funny for people like us who work with this kind of site and of course the question what are meant to rock and mountains in Jane Austen's refers to this kind of romantic struggle of humans and humans live that flow so fast contrasting the majestic nature of mountains and rocks that seem to be so still and seem not to be changing over time, yet we know that that's not the reality and we are working on those sites that are actually the result of interaction of human life and geologies, these sort of stone scapes that are shaped and carved at time, but the geologies and the action of past societies. So in a way, I think as we wrote also in the abstract for this session, we would like to investigate this sort of boundary between human societies and geologies and looking at it as something that is not static but rather dynamic, so where different carvings modify a surface that is more of a surface of transition of modifications of technological experimentation of life of funerary practice of production. So the first question I think we should try, I don't know, a point we should try to discuss is what are carpet sites, what are rocket sites, what are quarries, how we define that, what are the traces that we use for defining these sites, what are their functions, how we can catalogue them because I think and I think and I probably agree with me that this is a category of sites that has been neglected sometimes because positioned in maybe difficult areas, this for example is a picture of the catacombs in Paris that are beautiful and a part of them is a great tourist attraction with a lot of people visiting it every day but it's also an endangered heritage, a heritage that carries structural problems and then endangers not only itself but also the city above. So there is also a problem about valorisation and preservation of the sites other than their definition. There is also a problem with working with the site in a systematic way while in excavations we have of course horizontal level in archaeology of architecture, we have built heritage, in this case we are dealing with carved heritage so something that is negative that is produced through subtraction rather than adding material or both procedures at the same time. So when we work with something like this we need to revise totally the set of competencies and the set of methodologies that we apply to these kind of features in which of course a new phase of expectation, a new phase of life has as a consequence the erasement of the previous one in which traces are ephemeral and it's up to the archaeologists to try to understand which marks can be used for reconstructing different moments of the life of these sites. That are of course involved at different levels with society, the materials and the landscapes. This is a nice image that I found a few days ago of a patrol of Italian partisans working in the quarries of Carrara, the white marble in Carrara in Italy just to say that the sites that we are studying have different lives in a way or different biographies of different events in their life that can all be recorded and that belong to different type of stories. So how do we record these sites and how put them in connection to each other of course one tool is definitely cartography. Here is a GS map that we produced a few years ago with a series of quarries and the built sites that are connected to these supply sources of raw materials and the road network trying to link the supply sources and the distribution of materials over a territory. But of course cartography can represent a certain scale of accuracy, can be used as well in a more detailed scale but presents some problem because of course we are dealing with carved heritage and cartography especially in GIS is rather flat. So we'll reproduce the two dimensions but what we need is something more. So of course geomorphology and aerial photography of course is helpful to delineate some geomorphological features that can be used for identifying quarries sites for example, big accumulation of quarrying waste and of course I think we are all familiar with photogrammetry and I think that the event of photogrammetry in the last years radically changed the way that archaeologists dealing with quarries and rock cat sites approach their material because of course we can represent a reality that is articulated, that is carved inside an outcrop that otherwise wouldn't be visible. Here is like a complex of two overlapping churches in Matera in southern Italy and you can see that this wouldn't be visible except this upper part without the 3D representation. Also photogrammetry should be used with a critical approach of course using misuse of photogrammetry has been very criticized in the theory of digital archaeology so therefore photogrammetry in carved sites should also be discussed till what point we can use this tool, what is good, what is not good. I think personally I think that 3D models without being discussed, without being put in the context and used in a critical way have no meaning. For trying to use 3D models in a slightly different way we run an experimentation in Umeå, the university I come from sorry I forgot to say it in northern Sweden with the laboratory of digital humanities using 3D models for annotating them. So let's say how you would use GIS but in a sort of virtual reality environment so importing the 3D models, low resolution in Unity there is a gaming platform and using the controllers for creating features on the walls. So for example for marking tool marks, for marking holes and carvings or architectural elements that could be, sorry that could be interesting for defining the use and function of the site. This has been done to try to change the point of view of the server and not work with the static GIS but more, creates a more dynamic tool and I think that we are all struggling with this kind of different documentation system. And then of course there is archaeological science that in the last few decades has come becoming a big part of the study of rocket sites and quarries as well especially with quarries with the characterization of the materials extracted and their distribution to try to understand stone exploitation under a more social and mostly economical point of view. And then there is of course ethnographic record. I think that today we are going to see some example of that that can help us challenging some more cost effective hypothesis based more on our of course vision of the past. Here for example is an example of a village in northeast India in Nagaland where the villagers still make standing stones and this is an image of the quarry where they take their materials. As you can see that it's not something we are used to see because of course the operation of quarry has a ritual meaning. So they don't go systematically or following the geological outcrop but every block that they extract is done with a sort of ritual practices. So this is also interesting to see. And then finally something that is particularly interesting for me for my personal approach to this kind of sites is what is the environmental impact of this kind of site because in the moment in which humans and stone co-cure creating these carved sites there are new ecosystem that are born and that develop. This is another image of the quarries of Carrara. I don't know if you've been there you've seen it. It's the exploitation is huge. The mountain has been completely car destroyed and this is how it looks in the rivers down to the valley. So this white color that you see in the water is marble powder. Marble powder that comes directly from the mountains and goes in the rivers and covers everything healing all sorts of floor and fauna that is living in this rivers. So of course there is also like a consequence of this kind of exploitation. Of course in this case we are talking about industrial large scale but maybe also we can think about this kind of problems for ancient exploitation. And I'm going to end with some questions rather than conclusions. So some interesting points that maybe we can discuss later. I would like to address to myself first and then to the others as well. For documenting and studying this site there are a lot of different methods that lead to the collection of different data sets. I think we are missing a bit shared vocabularies and normalized systems in a way because we know that there are very different edition of studies the French one the Italian one the English one. And often the terms are not even the same. So this is something that we could discuss. And of course what is the role of us as archaeologists in promoting and preserving this carved heritage. We know that a lot of times despite the preservation and the valorization of this site is done by a speleologist in especially in the case of carved heritage. So what is the role of the archaeologist in this. And of course where do we go from here. The aim that we had at the beginning was to try to assemble specialists in this field from all over Europe and even further away. And then try to see how we can create some links between what we do and how we work with this site and try to go somewhere else try to create a network and maybe this network could be to be continued. And there is a next event that I will give you more information about later on. So in 2019 you know it's this carved city in the limestone that is situated in southern Italy there's going to be a big conference about carved sites next year. We are still organizing it so we are not sure about details but I'll let you know. So yeah this could be also like a way to see each other again and to continue the dialogue I hope we will start today. So yeah thank you for your attention.