 Thank you very much, and thanks to the EA to invite me for this keynote lecture. Acrology is an activity whose origin lie in the far distant past. Fifty thousand years ago, for example, nirndertal man or woman I had fossils back to the arcy-circure cave in Borgundi. Much later, on Agronidus' last king of Babylon in the 7th century BC, accidentally stumbled or opened the remains of a temple constructed 1500 years earlier by the famous king Amurabi in the city of Larsa in the present day Syria. Inspired by the discovery, he had the remains uncovered and restored into the following inscription that you hear. I raised there the inscription of the ancient king, et cetera, et cetera. My heart exalted holding the peacocks, carrying the shovel, transporting the basket. I rebuilt at the end the temple in the ancient style and decorated this structure for my lord Shamash and Asya. I restored it on a lobster tablet. I placed the inscription of the ancient king Amurabi which I had read along with my own and I reinstalled it forever. In one fell soup, Agronidus invented the archaeology in all its aspects as the science and language of origin. His description evokes the excitement of the initial discovery as we normally know as archaeology but also the techniques of excavation and restoration and finally the manipulation of the past for present ends. While archaeology, this time of the modern sense, really only developed in the Renaissance, it is in part at its roots an eroded interest on the part of scholars, princes and ecclesiastical dignitaries for the glorious antiquity of the Greco-Roman world which were in the process of being rediscovered at this time. It is this prestigious past that would fill museums, initially private museums, in cities across Europe that would inspire the first plant archaeological excavation such as those carried out at Pompeii. Soon after, however, at the end of the 18th century the notion of nations developed and in hand with the rise of romanticism and the French Revolution. Up until this time, kings ruled their subjects under divine rights, that is by the will of God and they expanded or reduced their kingdoms through wars and riots. Now, however, we see the rise of missions which were seen as communities of citizens animated by a civil destiny, sometimes by a single race and whose origin lay in the midst of time. Archaeology is elsewhere false tested with a new mission to legitimize this new nation by revealing in the glorious past. Those were constructed what we often term were constructed what we often term national natives. While every mission developed its own national narrative that of France had a particular other species opening chapter the defeat at Alesia of the goals against the Romans in March 2012 during the new the inauguration of the new museum designed by the architect Choumy at Alesia, the former French Prime Minister at the time, François Fillon declared that this was a founding defeat. Alesia was first excavated in the 1860s during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III who had a grandiose statue of a grandiose statue overseen in Gatorix the defeated Gaulish leader erected at the summit of the site excavations have been carried out ever since, most recently by a German a French team. As an act of flattery the sculptor M.A. Mille gave the Gaulish hero the features of the emperor which proved to be an auspicious choice since Napoleon III was subsequently defeated at Sedan in 1870 during the French Persian war. This defeat led to the establishment of the Second War, Reich which was proclaimed in the Galerie des Glasses in the Palace of Versailles in 1871 but also led to the establishment of the Third French Republic. This inaugural defeat at Alesia was in fact just the beginning since the Roman conquerors were in turn defeated in a few centuries later by the Germanic armies under the leadership of the Frankish king Clovis. The Franks in turn were destined to disappear culturally within the mass of the Gallo-Romans leaving only a few Germanic words in our Latin derived language. This is why in contrast to all other capital cities the National Museum located at the Louvre in the center of Paris in the Palace of the Kings however no objects found on the French soil but rather objects imported or looted from Italy, Greece and the Near East which the French elite of the 19th and 20th centuries saw as their true cultural roots. In contrast the German National Initiative opens with a victory that of the German armies of other Roman legends led by Vals in the year 9 A.D. This event is illustrated for example in the Bar Rolief phrased that still graces the star well of the old National Gallery in Berlin where the same thing is followed by the depiction of the Christianization of the Germans by Saint Boniface in parallel to the statue of in parallel of the statue of Wesson heroics at Aletheia a gigantic statue of army news was erected in a red mold on the base of this statue is a bronze barolief of Kaiser Wilhelm I fashioned from cannons seized from the French army at Soudan furthermore in parallel with the inauguration of the museum at Aletheia the Waos Schlatt Museum was recently opened in Kalkrisa by Chancellor Angela Merkel here on the slide however no mention was made in her speech of a founding victory but rather it took the form of a call for peace getting back to France there is in fact a National Museum of Archaeology in the Paris area but it is located in a distant residential suburb at Saint-Germain on the and its lower profile is matched by the lower number of visitors that cause its threshold the fact that was recently highlighted by the French court of auditors it has been suggested that it should be moved to the Ile de la Cité in the center of Paris to a new site facing the Louvre and that is should even be enlarged to cover the entire history of France at the moment the collection comes to an about end at the Merovingens the Museum of Aquitaine in Bordeaux for example presents exactly such a large historical panorama from Palérethique to now at least on a regional level as do museums in many other countries but in striking confirmation of the regional denial the higher administration of the French Ministry of Culture immediately opposes suggestion without any political arbitration at a higher level this explains why the trajectory of rescue archaeology in France diverge from that of many other countries in fact up until the 80s of the archaeological site discovered in the course of large scale development works such as underground core parks motorway high speed train lines or quarrying were more or less abandoned to the Bordeaux's however we know now that in any proposed railway or motorway corridor for example one important site will be encountered on average every one kilometer admittedly in the post war construction efforts have had to prioritize urgent needs and initially focused on providing accommodation and rebuilding the industrial infrastructure however by the 60s the country was once again rich and under the auspice of the minister of the culture Andre Malau the writer culture was cherished great effort was for example spent on innovating the historic facade of the capital city however it was not until 2001 that the law was voted for the protection of archaeological heritage on which obliged developers to fund rescue excavation prior to large scale works it was this law that also created the national institute for preventive archaeology in Europe so 150 years after the creation of the French archaeological school that undertook extensive excavation at Delphi Delos for mania and crate however no sooner was this law adopted on January 2001 than it was attacked by the new conservative parliamentary majority and it has been under attack ever since the most emblematic measure that has been to open the so called market for this rescue excavation by authorizing the creation of private archaeological companies most specifically if the services of the minister of culture demand it necessary to carry out an archaeological excavation prior to a development it is the developer who choose the company who will carry out the excavation by putting the various actors in competition the body selected may be the INRA a regional archaeological service or equally a commercial archaeological company who will generally propose a cheaper and more rapid intervention to the detriment of scientific quality the service of the minister of culture retain a watchdog status but start of resources and personnel they have difficulty carrying out this war furthermore this private companies can benefit from a significant research tax credit which allows them to propose a reduced fee in other words public money from french citizens is used to help private company to compete against and sometimes threaten the very existence of public services in a regional or municipality archaeological services while at the same time lowering the quality of archaeological excavation and the protection of our archaeological heritage of course the granting of this tax credit to commercial company is subject to the opinion of scientific experts who determine if the company's activities truly constitute scientific research however this opinion is purely consultative and the administrators of the Ministry of Finance in their ultra-liberal real and ideology at the time they were opposed to the setting up of the Europe often ignore it and thus subsidize these commercial entities the court of auditors turns a blinder A to this as those the so-called competition authority the so-called independent body close to the Ministry for Finance in such instance the term independent is used or should we say abused or modified body where all the members are nominated by the government as elected by their peers nonetheless because of this commercial place war several private archaeological company have already followed and the largest of them is now in severe financial difficulty in addition in France archaeology tends to be one of the favorite targets of our spoken critics of rules and standards in 2013 for example deputies Alain Lambert a conservative and Jean Claude Boulin a socialist stated in a record an administrative standard that is written the abuse of our duty to archaeological memory can sometimes compromise our duty to the future in that it was important to limit the number of rescue excavation also in October 2014 the government issued a framework of so-called 50 new simplification for business which included the so-called number 14 adopted under pressure from the public work private sector and which states somewhat jargonistically as you can see that for 2015 when the known nature of the terrain is unlikely to further the existence of remains alternative investigation technique particularly non-destructive surveying will be employed so as to make diagnostic more rapid in plain language this means that that's pre-development that's trenching mechanical excavators over 10% of the development sites as it currently the practice like on the picture will be a think of the past and instead we will have to rely on the so-called non-destructive geophysical perspective this despite the fact that comparative studies in France at least clearly show that 80% of sites discover through destructive testing actually failure to be detected using such alternative non-destructive techniques finally while nothing has happened as yet we are all aware of the tenacious of such argument for the simplification of standards which can be discerned in the recent French law governing the evolution is the name the evolution of housing territorial and digital planning the law has led in the case of heritage to the suppression of the so-called statement of conformity issued by the architects of Bâtiment de France who control every building permit and it's a placement by a simple non-constraining recommendation everything leads us to fear in the present context that there will be further attacks on rescue archaeology in the near future however near the costs near the delay associated with rescue excavation are prohibited there are in fact a million of constructs like depollution, water table geological testing ecology that nobody deems unnecessary and that well-organized developers manage to foresee the overall planning of the works as we are at the cost of archaeological investigation there are in reality really in excess of one to two persons of the total cost of the development and are in any case in the high speed train tickets for instance or tolls on housing in prices large developers are perfectly aware of this and they now use their participation in archaeological works as an opportunity to self-promotion more than more over of the 50,000 hectares of plants developed in France every year or 500 square kilometers equivalent to an area the size of French department every decade only about 50 to 20 persons are affected to archaeological testing and of these only one case in five results in a real excavation this means that barely 4% of the developed land surface is actually excavated and this work generally takes a matter of weeks or at most a few months finally certain things of daily activity entirely escape archaeological supervision such as large scale deforestation and especially agricultural work modern agricultural machinery penetrates deep beneath the surface and is capable of gradually reducing ancient walls to dust as attested by Iron and Jerry Iron and Jerry the sign and destruction actually accounts for at least half of the destruction to the archaeological results as we have discussed one more time yesterday in our session with Maryakia where many of the paper about the Valetta convention it would be useful to have equivalent statistic for all European countries showing the area subject to development works each year and the area that are really investigated archaeologically and actually excavated these figures exist for certain countries but are seriously lacking for others however when attempting to define a real policy regarding rescue excavation particularly in the context of the European association of archaeologists over the past 30 years against the official national narrative and in many parts in Europe archaeology has in reality completely overturned our understanding of the history of the French territory and in the other countries and has destroyed many long-held cliché prehistoric people were not so rich roads but rather life in equilibrium with the environment and it healthy and in fact we all here in this room too carry within us Neanderthal genes the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry over a period of millennia millennia often ignored in our school curriculum and in our culture represents the most radical revolution in our history from which spang among among other things the demographic explosion the generalization of violence and the emergence of social hierarchy the Celts did not live in huts in the middle of the forest nor did they eat wild boar like obelix in the post-erics comics but rather they lived in two towns surrounded by countryside that was more deforested than ours today and regularly divided into large farms lived antiquity did not witness onslaught of blue craze barbarians but instead was a long period of progressive ethnic decomposition and cultural mixing the middle age were not an age of darkness but constituted the first industrial revolution which paved the way for the ninth nineteenth century industrial revolution and I could go on archaeology is or could be for example an opportunity to reflect on the identity of society and their constant evolution on migration and continual intermingling on the collapse of societies and their relationships with the environment as well as on power and resistance to power however all this is struggling to make its way into school curriculum despite the efforts of the number of the digital educators and into cultural institutions there is still in France and in some other European countries the lack of regular archaeological programs on TV channels in contrast to the situation for instance in the UK Scandinavia or Japan there have been plenty of attempts but they always fall full of the intellectual laziness of the channel directors who tend to transmit their own disinterest in the subject back to their audience compared to Scandinavia the US or Canada France for example tends to lag behind in the field of meteorography but the issue of rescue archaeology is also a European question since 1992 this activity has been regulated by the Malta of Aletta Convention however this Malta Convention does not say anything about either the financing of rescue archaeology or about its organization this is why its organization can vary considerably depending on the various national traditions at present depending on the country two main options emerge on the one hand the state is seen as the principal actor not only in the supervision but also in the organization of archaeology under other archaeology seen almost as an economic activity like any other which is therefore part of the so-called market economy these two broad options are also found more generally in the administrative and political structure of Europe it would seem that the best option of all would be to provide Europe with large common public services by using the various national public services so as to create for example a single European postal system a single public transport system a single power supply service a single health insurance system etc the chosen second option is practically the opposite we are opted to progressively eliminate the public services of each European nation and to hand them over to the competitive private sector the so-called free and fair competition in the Brussels news peak the process which is more advanced in some countries than in others consequently we should have a multitude of competitive private companies each with the possibility of working anywhere within the European economic space in the first case we are dealing with public services whose only reason for being is to serve the public interest in the second case we are dealing with private company whose only reason for being is to make a profit but who in making this profit are supposed to offer the best possible service to the consumer on condition that this consumer really has all objective information at his disposal the first the first model belongs to the social democratic political tradition or to water down version which is sometimes known as the prime land capitalism the second model belongs to the British and American tradition of economic liberalism or ultra liberalism which was particularly developed under the leadership of Ronald Reagan and Marguerite Thatcher surprisingly the citizens of Europe have never benefited from an open political debate on the essential question of what type of society should be selected and in practice it is the liberal model that has come to the fore in common European policy Admittedly the pressure exerted by the liberal economic model is not just a European issue in fact this pressure which originates from the US is applied through the international bodies such as the World Trade Organization the International Monetary Fund or the Work Bank among others in the case of archaeology the results of privatization has been pretty negative in many European countries at least as we have witnessed in France there is a decline in quality and working condition scientific documentation becomes dispersed and level of recording vary greatly depending on the company on sites involved and also against the working condition of the archaeologist on the field outside Europe this trend is even more marked in the United States where some companies have a reputation for never finding archaeological sites during testing operation carried out for development in contrast in Japan an industrial country that devotes more time and resources to archaeology about 1 billion euro and 60,000 professional archaeology archaeology was for a long time largely a public service and ministered by local governments and there were practically no private company until the ultra-liberal policies introduced by the present government when we speak of the current crisis in Europe or more not only economic but political societal and cultural or more precisely in the EU we might ask ourselves if this vision which is ultimately philosophical of a society where everything is subject to competition might not actually be the deep rooted and the most serious cause of this crisis instead of solidarity between citizens we have in fact being promised conditions of war of everyone against everyone as described by the English philosopher Thomas Cox in the 17th century it should be noted that while the EU has taken numerous initiatives in order to create a large financial and economic market the common currency increased commercial competition and privatization of public services it has done precious little in other essential areas such as taxash taxation pensions social rights labor laws education or culture admittedly it does who are the title of European city of culture to two European cities per year and has proclaimed this year European year of cultural heritage it has also attempted to unify European university system through the so-called Boglania process of 1999 by adopting the system preparing in the English speaking world the large part of the disillusion currently failed by citizens of the EU is not due to immigration issue that has been manipulated by the far rights in several countries including France Italy, Germany and several central European countries instead it springs from this market contrast between constraining commercial and financial rules and the complete lack of ambition in the social political and cultural domains in this wider context the problem of archeology is only a symptom of serious and worrying years moreover as regards archeology the European rules are so vague that regression has been possible as we have recently seen in Hungary where a new law greatly limits the time and budget allocated to rescue archeology the real duty and responsibility of the EAA to denounce such regulation it should be added that the situation of rescue archeology in Europe is far from being the worst in international scale the situation in the less developed country is more worrying there are only a few dozen archeologists employed on the entire African continent which is 3 times larger than geographical Europe and 6 times larger than the EU which has between 25,000 and 30,000 archeologists even China which is a highly organized state has only 2,000 professional archeologists for an area similar to that of geographical Europe it is significant that while there are UNESCO convention governing their subject there is nothing dealing with rescue archeology with the exception of the very old recommendation on international principles applicable to archeological excavation issued in New Delhi in 1956 which is as its title indicates is simply non binding recommendation which has a little actual influence under the auspices of UNESCO however a number of decisions have been made which highlights the interest taken by states in archeological heritage in Venice in 1964 the international charter for the conservation restoration etc was signed which is in turn led to the creation of the International Council on monumental sites or ECOMOS Warsaw in 1965 still within the framework of UNESCO 1964 saw the launch of the MAMOS campaign to save the temple in Nubia and Egypt which were flattened by the rising waters of Lake Nasser following the construction of the Aswan Dam a certain number of countries of countries took part in the campaign and it is paradoxical that 50 years later such large scale international rescue operation have never been repeated since the large dams erected on the Euphrates river in the 1990s for instance submerged thousands of archeological sites without any large scale intervention in Syria and in Turkey the ancient Greek city of Virgoma in Turkey underwent only were summary and insufficient rescue excavations which were undertaken in very difficult conditions by international teams the early 70s saw the convention on the means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import etc which was assigned in Paris in 17 and the convention concerning the protection of the world agricultural and natural heritage has also signed in Paris in 72 the letter gave rise exactly 40 years ago to the world heritage center which has since down up a list of almost 1000 archeological sites throughout the world which are considered to be of global significance to humanity some of the sites such as Angkor in Cambodia have been included in a separate list namely the list of world heritage in danger the prehistoric Lascaux cave in France was recently considered for inclusion on this list in any case inclusion on the list does not mean that a site will receive UNESCO financial aid since the organization itself had relatively limited funds instead the list is intended to encourage each country concerned to better protect the sites included it should also be mentioned that the 1000 sites on the list are all high profile prestigious sites without exaggeration if we extrapolate from the statistics I quoted earlier for France it is likely that up to 1000 archeological sites are destroyed in the world every day due to development work and this destruction occurs without the benefit of rescue excavation this is why archeologists can't remain in this scholarly towers but must also be responsible actors in the protection of archeological heritage not only in their own countries but on an international level also there must also be responsible for ensuring that the past is not manipulated for the benefit of reprehensible ideology I don't wish to end on a pessimistic note in recent years archeological research has continued to contribute significantly to our understanding of Europe's past as we have seen here in the AAA during all this for death even so archeological heritage is by definition non-renewable rescue archeology has allowed us to preserve numerous sites at least through documentation furthermore, the method of techniques used in archeological investigation are constantly evolving for example the application of laser protection allows us to discover sites in mountainous and forested area physical chemical analysis tells us more and more about the composition and circulation of all material strontium analysis allows us to identify migration genetic not only through light of family relationships but also helps us to understand the movements of individuals or entire population even so we must be careful not to commit the same error of 19th century physical anthropologists which equated people with race in what is sometimes known as the Cossinian model genetic results concerning the the bigger culture published this year clearly show that there is no correlation between genetic heritage and material culture and civil session was also discussing these points in the present concerns if we want to go further it is clear that in the face of this issue the European association of archaeologists must play a fundamental and concrete role in the future particularly by clarifying certain points of the Malta convention thank you for attention