Cups & Cakes 4: "Archaeology at ULB : a survey"

Programme overview

The CreA-Patrimoine , a brief presentation (Prof. Athena Tsingarida.)

The CreA-Patrimoine of ULB is a leading Research Centre in the fields of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage. It is part of the Department of History, Arts and Archaeology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences and brings together a vibrant and dynamic community of people, including academics, research fellows, technical staff and PhD students committed into innovative research and teaching. The Centre is engaged with the archaeology of most regions of the world, from Eurasia to Africa, the Americas and the Mediterranean area and most periods of the past, with further expertise in Cultural Heritage both nationally and internationally. It organizes fieldwork training for the students in archaeology at ULB, leads international research programs and is engaged in a wide variety of educational projects. A brief presentation of the Centre will provide the audience of CIVIS with an overview of the main on-going research programs and the areas of expertise of its members. 

The PANORAMA platform (ULB) : a tool for the 3D valorization of heritage (Sebastien Clerbois)

Recognized by ULB since 2016, PANORAMA (platform for the acquisition and digitization of objects and surveys in architecture, monuments and archaeology) associates three laboratories, the CReA-Patrimoine (Archaeology and Heritage), Alice (Architecture) and the LISA (Engineering). Through selected examples, the communication aims to reveal the added value of digital humanities not only for the valorization but also for the study of heritage.

The excavation and research program of the CreA-Patrimoine (ULB) at the Necropolis of the ancient city of Itanos, East Crete, Greece (Athena Tsingerida)

Since 2011, the CreA-Patrimoine (ULB) under the auspices of the Belgian School at Athens leads excavations in the ancient Necropolis of the city of Itanos. This harbour settlement, located on the East coast of Crete, was founded ca the 9th -8th c. BC following its position on the cross-roads between north and south, east and west, and thanks to its well-protected bay that offers a sanctuary to ships travelling along, recently rediscovered, maritime routes. At least from the Archaic period onwards, the city derived its strength and, most probably, a large part of its income, from maritime traffic. According to Herodotus, it played a role in the Greek colonization of Cyrene (Libya), while, in the Hellenistic period, following later sources and archaeological evidence, it served as a port of call to the Lagids’ network throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean.

The team of the CreA-Patrimoine, directed by Athena Tsingarida and Didier Viviers, resumed a previous five-year excavations program (1995 -1999)  directed by Didier Viviers in the ancient cemetery of the city under the auspices of the French School at Athens. The excavations brought to light a sector of the cemetery dated from the 7th to the 1st century BC, and yielded a wide variety of funerary monuments and burials from incineration pits to family enclosures. But, most importantly, the research program undertaken so far brought into light a unique funerary complex, dated to the late 7^th – late 5^th c. B.C., a period considered to be a hiatus in the burial customs and funerary occupation of Crete. The study of the complex which is not completely excavated so far suggests that it was used as a place of worship to the ancestors, where feasting and ritual practices took place in relation with earlier graves, in order to construct both a social identity and a status visibility. Within the new five-year program (2021-2025), fieldwork will continue to complete the excavations of this complex while further excavations will take place North to the funerary building,  in area which seems to have been in use since the early occupation of the site. The new program seeks to undestand the spatial and symbolic relation of the funerary complex with these earlier graves. It further aims to reconstruct the funerary landscape and the social and spatial organization of a necropolis that provides us with a rare and well-preserved case of long-term activity from the 8th to the 1st century BC.  

Approaching the medieval townscape of Brussels : Brussels Archaeological Survey (2017–2021) and Geophysical prospection of the Grand-Place (may 2018) (Paulo Charruadas)

BAS is a multidisciplinary project financed by urban.brussels (the regional public service of Brussels) and carried out by the CReA-Patrimoine under the leading of François Blary. The survey aims at studying with archaeological and historical tools the historical cellars still preserved in the Brussels city centre. The objective of the survey is twofold : on the one hand, we seek to characterize each site under study from chronological, diachronic and material viewpoint in order to get a dating as precise as possible, a typology and in a final step to elaborate a scientific inventory ; on the other hand, and because the cellars are less involved with transformations in their material structure, we direct our attention on all information given by the material remains about the medieval urban fabric. The combination of both approaches allows a dive into the medieval townscape.

To complement the project, BAS team has undertaken in may 2018, through practical collaboration with two teams of France and Italy, a geophysical survey with latest technologies of the Grand-Place’s esplanade to obtain a precise picture of the archaeological substructures existing under the pavement and bearing witness of the ancient form the market square and the central districts of the medieval Brussels.