Spotlight on Heritage

The desert-like coast of the Central Andes, which runs alongside the Pacific Ocean, has suffered earthquakes, tsunamis, and other natural catastrophes for the last few millenniums, often caused by the El Niño phenomenon. In order to understand how human societies adapted we head to Peru, where an international team is examining the remains of the Huaca Amarilla and Huaca Grande sites, which were inhabited from the fifth to the fifteenth century CE. A drone collects aerial images of a collapsed wall within this heritage site threatened by pillaging.

How does one view a work of art, depending on whether one is an adult or a child, a regular museumgoer or not? To find out, the sociologist Mathias Blanc coordinated a study in 2017 with visitors to an exhibition on the early-seventeenth-century painters the Le Nain brothers, held at the Louvre-Lens museum (Pas-de-Calais). Thanks to the Ikonikat app, visitors can use a tablet to indicate what drew their attention in the paintings, but without using any words. This data is then compared to better understand our perception of art.

A walk through the sounds of eighteenth century Paris: that is the incredible journey proposed by the team working on the Bretez project. Its video covers the area between the pont Notre-Dame and the Pont-au-Change, located across from today's place du Châtelet. It offers 70 different soundscapes that incorporate the acoustics from the streets of the time, and showcases the activity of the merchants, artisans, and washerwomen who once worked along the banks of the Seine.

Discovered in Pakistan in 1985 by a French archeological mission, the Mehrgarh Amulet, whose back side is pictured here through a resin coating, is of immeasurable historical value: it is 6000 years old, and is the first known evidence of the metallurgy technique of lost-wax casting, which is still in use today. Researchers unlocked the secret of how this precious copper amulet was produced thanks to new methods of analysis, notably conducted at the Soleil synchrotron.

The correspondence of Marcel Proust, a trove of thousands of letters dispersed across the world and addressed to the likes of Jean Cocteau, Lucien Daudet, or his concierges, will be the subject of a major digitization project bringing together French and American researchers. The Corr-Proust project, which will begin to appear online in November with letters written during the First World War, will shed new light on the writer's work and period.

In 2016, scientists from different backgrounds arranged to meet one another in the chapelle Notre-Dame-des-Fontaines in the Alpes-Maritimes region, with the goal of studying the chapel’s painted decor, notably its materials and how they evolved over time. This research is part of the Fiatlux program, which seeks to unite images and various techniques of physicochemical analysis within an interactive software platform.

During the fourteenth century BCE, the pharaoh Akhenaten shook up the New Kingdom of Egypt by imposing the sole worship of the sun disk Aton, and by initiating an architectural revolution with roofless temples bathing in divine sunlight. A new capital, Amarna, was built in accordance with unprecedented techniques. Researchers have successfully modeled the city in 3D for the first time.

Sometimes scientists discover genuine treasures by chance, such as the one unearthed in the fall of 2017 at Cluny Abbey (Saône-et-Loire), a major cultural and religious center of medieval Europe. Hidden beneath the former infirmary were precious objects as well as gold and silver coins dating back to the twelfth century.