Papers by Nicoletta Bianchi
<p>The passage of the storm Alex favored on October 2, 2020 the triggering of very ... more <p>The passage of the storm Alex favored on October 2, 2020 the triggering of very intense rainfall in the coastal valleys of the Alpes-Maritimes, including that of the Roya, which caused many devastating hydro-geomorphological processes, mainly floods and landslides. The destruction, which has affected modern and ancient infrastructures, has been considerable, with dramatic social and economic consequences. The processes have also unearthed archaeological remains dating from the Bronze Age to the modern era.</p><p>Meteorological analyses confirm the exceptional character of this Mediterranean episode, while marine sedimentary records made in the deltas of the Var crossed with C14 dating of ancient torrential deposits identified in the Roya watershed indicate a return time of about half a millennium.</p><p>The major difficulty in the case of the Roya is that the reactivation of the entire late glacial active band has upset the geometry of the river's major bed compared to what it was before Storm Alex. In the areas of torrential deposits, there is a widening of the bed of the order of 1 to 10 and a rise of several meters in the height of the alluvial table. This major modification implies that before defining the new risk zones and deciding on the reconstruction of the infrastructures, the impact of the floods recorded in the past should be modeled according to this new geometry of the bed. Moreover, in the context of global warming, it is not excluded that we observe a higher recurrence of events such as storm Alex. We present the preliminary results of our research program (STORY: "Risks and societies in the Roya basin: multidisciplinary and multi-temporal analysis, from the slopes to the sea") and discuss the difficulties in reconciling the perceptions of the different actors, the necessary time of research not always easy to articulate with the urgency of reconstruction and the vital need to open up sectors that otherwise risk being permanently abandoned by the populations.</p><p>Keywords: Holocene, flash floods, climate change, risk management</p><p> </p>
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Nov 17, 2021
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Jul 18, 2022
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 15, 2020
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 1, 2018
International audienceSince 1868 and their attribution to Prehistory by the scientific community,... more International audienceSince 1868 and their attribution to Prehistory by the scientific community, the some 35 000 rock engravings of the region of Mount Bego (Tende, Alpes-Maritimes, France) have been the subject of dozens of symbolic interpretations, most of which identify the site as a sanctuary dedicated to one or more deities of the Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age. Our theoretical and critical approach proposes to identify and expose the main weaknesses of these interpretations, which are often based on inappropriate comparisons, hasty observations, sometimes detached from the chrono-cultural context of the engravings. Frequented very early, from the early Neolithic period, the region of Mount Bego is above all a high altitude environment, first of all linked to pastoralism and the practice of the summer pastures, as well as the exploitation of raw materials and hunting activities. From an anthropological perspective, and taking into account the diachrony in the realization of the different cycles of engraved motifs, we thus discuss the identities and the functions of the prehistoric engravers in order to renew the debate about the meaning of these rock images and their relations to the profane and sacred
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2014
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 28, 2020
International audienceIn this article, we present an overview of the explanation of the main prop... more International audienceIn this article, we present an overview of the explanation of the main proposals about the prehistoric engravings in the Mont Bego region. There are three kinds of hypothesis: that engravings were a sort of religious expression (it is, among others, the Bego God theory, popularised by Henry de Lumley et al.); that engravings were used to define pasturelands and to guide herds; and, lastly, that engravings were used to mark male rites of passage. A part of these works suffers from recurrent methodological gaps: poor quality recordings, neglect of the chronocultural context of the engravings and their diachrony, pre-eminence of the qualitative analyses upon quantitative analyses or unsuitable comparisons. However, in view of the intrinsic features of the site (isolated, difficult to access, inhospitable), of its vocation, a priori eminently pastoral since the Neolithic, together with some regional ethnographic comparisons, we support the idea that the act of engraving could have had the function of materialising the social promotion of young boys in summer pastures on the site during the prehistoric period
International audienceLocalizzate tra 2000 e 2800 m d’altitudine, le rocce incise della regione d... more International audienceLocalizzate tra 2000 e 2800 m d’altitudine, le rocce incise della regione del monte Bego (valle delle Meraviglie e di Fontanalba) costituiscono una delle più importanti concentrazioni d’arte rupestre in Eurasia, per la Preistoria recente. Si tratta, inoltre, di uno dei primi siti d’alta quota occupati durante l’Olocene (Neolitico antico). Alla fine del XIX secolo, B.-E. Hildebrand e E. Rivière furono i primi a proporre un’attribuzione cronologica coerente delle incisioni a martellina del sito. L’osservazione delle rappresentazioni d’armi, infatti, permise loro di situare il corpus rupestre ad una data approssimativa intorno all’età del Bronzo. Tra gli anni ‘20 e ‘30, P. Barocelli propose invece un confronto con alcuni oggetti appartenenti alla cultura italiana di Remedello e di conseguenza con l’età del Rame. Durante gli anni ’40, C. Conti avanzò l’ipotesi che alcune incisioni realizzate con tecnica lineare (definite « schematico-lineari ») appartenessero a una...
This paper presents the architecture of a holonic multi-agent system for rock art interpretation ... more This paper presents the architecture of a holonic multi-agent system for rock art interpretation and discusses the results achieved within the "Indiana MAS" project. We show how the AgentSketch and the ImageRec holons belonging to the Indiana MAS, able to cope with hand drawn sketches and images respectively, have been tested in the domain of Mount Bego's prehistoric rock art (southern French Alps), and how the Manent agent-based framework for the seamless integration of Digital Libraries has been plugged into Indiana MAS to provide text classification, as well as multilingual access to structured repositories. The way Indiana MAS holons cooperate in order to provide correct interpretations of ambiguous shapes is discussed by means of an example based on hypotheses recently advanced by archaeologists. * This article is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at the 6th International KES Conference on Agents and Multi-agent Systems − Technologies and Applications 2012 [42]. 1 We use "Indiana MAS" to denote both the funded project and the Multi-Agent System, or MAS for short, that will result from it.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2014
This paper presents the Indiana Ontology for modeling the knowledge about Mount Bego's rock art a... more This paper presents the Indiana Ontology for modeling the knowledge about Mount Bego's rock art and its exploitation in the IndianaMAS project. Although many projects use ontologies for semantic processing of cultural heritage digital objects, we are not aware of such ontologies in the rock art domain. Also, the Indiana Ontology is fully and seamlessly integrated with the IndianaMAS framework components, namely the intelligent software agents and the Digital Library used to classify and store multimedia and multilingual objects, thus making the IndianaMAS framework a good representative of an advanced and innovative information management system for the cultural heritage domain.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012
This paper presents the first results achieved within the Indiana MAS project funded by Italian M... more This paper presents the first results achieved within the Indiana MAS project funded by Italian Ministry for Education, University and Research, MIUR. We discuss how the AgentSketch holon belonging to the Indiana MAS has been extended to cope with images, besides hand drawn sketches, and has been tested in the domain of Mount Bego's prehistoric rock art (southern French Alps). The way Indiana MAS holons cooperate in order to provide correct interpretations of ambiguous shapes is discussed by means of an example based on hypotheses recently advanced by archaeologists.
Journée consacrée à la transhumance dans le centre de l’Italie : Santuario di Ercole Vincitore (Tivoli, Italie), Jun 12, 2019
International audienc
Bulletin de la Société préhistorique française, 2020
Poster, 2019
Nella regione del Monte Bego, le incisioni rupestri e i ripari sotto roccia frequentati durante l... more Nella regione del Monte Bego, le incisioni rupestri e i ripari sotto roccia frequentati durante la preistoria si situano ad alta quota, tra 2000 m et 2900 m d'altitudine. La regione, isolata e difficile di accesso, corrisponde alla bordura sud-est del massiccio cristallino dell'Argentera-Mercantour. Le 36 000 incisioni del sito, realizzate con tecnica a martellina, sono classificate in corniformi e aratri, armi, antropomorfi, figure geometriche e motivi non rappresentativi. Tuttavia il Monte Bego non si caratterizza esclusivamente per le sue rocce incise, ma anche per la presenza di numerose strutture in pietra a secco, il cui utilizzo a fini pastorali non esclude un possibile legame con l'attività incisoria. Lo studio del materiale archeologico rinvenuto all'interno di tali strutture ha permesso di mettere in evidenza una sequenza cronologica che dal Neolitico antico arriva fino alle porte della storia, riconoscibile attraverso assemblaggi litigi e ceramici che evocano le attività economiche dei primi pastori delle Alpi (Progetto Eticalp-Direzione : D. Binder). Le rappresentazioni incise sembrano anch'esse confermare la tradizione pastorale del sito : i motivi « topografici » (prima metà del IV millennio a.C.), ad esempio, sono distribuiti lungo le drailles (sentieri pastorali di origine antica utilizzati ad oggi dai pastori moderni) (Huet, Bianchi 2016) e trovano riscontri formali con i ripari frequentati durante la preistoria. Le grandi composizioni di corniformi in fila sono anch'esse localizzate lungo i sentieri pastorali, probabile simbolo del gregge che sale verso l'alpeggio (Bianchi 2016). Mettendo a punto un sistema di transumanza estiva, l'uomo neolitico sembra quindi aver dato vita a una produzione simbolica e rituale in parallelo al suo adattamento in ambito alpino. Le incisioni rupestri diventano in questo modo testimonianza di pratiche sociali, tra le quali quella del pastoralismo è valorizzata dalla preistoria fino a tempi a noi molto vicini. Durante il XIX et XX secolo ad esempio, più di mille testi sono stati incisi durante la transumanza estiva, da pastori originari di Tenda (Giusto-Magnardi 1996): si tratta di bambini, adolescenti o giovani adulti maschi, per i quali « l'atto di incidere riveste una funzione che iscrive il giovane uomo nel suo nuovo ruolo e ne sancisce la promozione sociale » (Magnardi, Breteau 2005, p. 73). È verosimile quindi che anche i primi incisori del Monte Bego siano stati dei giovani pastori che, incidendo, hanno celebrato il proprio « rito di passaggio » all'età adulta (Masson Mourey, Bianchi in stampa).
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Papers by Nicoletta Bianchi