Advanced Grant (AdG), SH6, ERC-2013-ADGProject acronym: RURLANDProject: Rural Landscape in North-Eastern Roman GaulResearcher (PI): Michel ReddeHost Institution (HI): Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, FranceStart date: 2014-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31Summary: "The RurLand project aims at the study of the rural Areas in the North-Eastern Gaul, since La Tène D1 period until the end of 5th century AD. Focused on the Roman period, it proposes to examine the evolution of the rural world with its protohistoric antecedents and its changes of late Antiquity, in a vast zone where recent research did not give place to syntheses. The basic assumption is that incorporation in the Roman Empire of the areas which compose Eastern Gaul, far from providing homogeneity in their economic and social conditions, accentuated and accelerated processes of space differentiations already perceptible before the Conquest. Many areas fully benefitted from the contributions of Rome (town and country planning, economic consequences of the presence of the administration and the soldiers) to engage or continue at an intensive pace an economic development which can take however different forms according to the territories. But it is important as well to understand why other sectors remained away from this movement. Supported on a GIS, the project intends to integrate the approach of sources very different in their nature and their object, but complementary and seldom studied together: archaeological excavations, in particular those which result from the preventive archeology most recent, study of the various components of the rural estates of any nature, carpology, zoological material, pedological charts, air photographs, LIDAR datas, so as to promote a multiscalar approach to the areas considered, from the sites themselves to the territories. It is a question of understanding the spatial and historic dynamic of the rural world of this old time. From this point of view will be privileged windows of studies on scales which could be very different, according to the quality, the abundance and the nature of the information which they provide. The finished product will be the delivery of a monograph published and a system of online information."