• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• 2017-2021close
• Publications close
• Research data close
• Other research products close
• European Commission close
• Hyper Article en Ligne - Sciences d... close
• Archivio della ricerca- Università ... close

Peu attesté dans les inscriptions, et uniquement durant l’Empire, surtout au IIe siècle apr. J.-C., dans les provinces, à Cyrène, Avenches chez les Helvètes, Centuripe en Sicile et, probablement, à Nîmes en Narbonnaise, le sphaeristerium est mentionné dans les sources littéraires d’époque impériale et dans le Digeste. Toutes ces attestations signalent un lieu plus ou moins aménagé ou construit, dans un contexte sportif ou ludique, thermal ou balnéaire, public ou privé – dans une villa –, où les hommes jouaient à la balle. C’était un lieu de sociabilité : la pratique ludique participait à la construction civique et sociale du uir. Magistrats municipaux et empereurs en ont construit ou restauré et y ont joué. C’est un élément d’identification normée. The sphaeristerium was the place where Roman men played to ball game. The word is documented by three or four inscriptions discovered in Sicily, in Germania Superior, in Cyrenaica, and Gallia Narbonensis. This game room was designated as paganicum by epigraphy in Africa Proconsularis. Pliny the Younger described the sphaeristeria he possessed in his uillae. It is noticed Digest proved these places were located in private gardens. Sphaeristerium was in any case associated with bath and heated rooms. Gamers and ball boys were well known by literary and epigraphic documents: young persons, old men, freedmen, slaves gamed skillfully in order to relax themselves, to try out their ability. The corpus dated from 1st century AD until to 3rd century AD highlights a sociability complied with uirtus and bodily practices coming from palestra.

Lieu de sociabilité par excellence des Grecs anciens, le symposion constitue aussi un cadre privilégié pour jouer avec les normes sociales. Au-delà de la consommation partagée du vin qui fonde la cohésion du groupe, ce moment permet de réaffirmer les valeurs et les normes, mais aussi d’outrepasser ces dernières, dans un cadre circonscrit. Cette oscillation constante entre les règles et leur transgression peut être matérialisée à travers des jeux d’habileté et d’équilibre qui matérialisent, de façon ludique, cette tension à l’œuvre dans le symposion. Outre le célèbre kottabos, cet article s’interrogera sur l’existence d’autres formes de jeux et de détournements dans le cadre de l’iconographie des vases de banquet. Cômastes et satyres peuvent ainsi se jouer des règles, dans le cadre d’un jeu de miroir entre ordre et chaos, entre les normes et leur transgression. Enfin, à un troisième niveau de lecture, la notion d’équilibre sera explorée plus largement, à travers la représentation de jeux d’équilibre moins formalisés. L’ivresse excessive menace l’équilibre du buveur, en faisant perdre l’enkrateia, le contrôle des sens et du corps. Les jeux d’habileté ne constituent en effet que la partie émergée d’un champ sémantique bien plus large de l’équilibre, qui se déploie dans l’image à travers des jeux graphiques qui associent vin, vases et buveurs dans des scènes caractérisées par l’imminence de la chute Place of sociability par excellence for the ancient Greeks, the symposion is also a privileged setting for playing with social norms. Beyond the shared consumption of wine, which underpins the group’s cohesion, the symposion allows values and norms to be reaffirmed, but also to be exceeded, within a circumscribed framework. This constant wobbling between the rules and their transgression often takes the form, in the iconography of Greek vases, of a game of mirrors between civilisation and wildness, in which komasts and satyrs embody a counter-model of civic sociability. At a second level of interpretation, this wobbling can also be interpreted metaphorically, throughout the notion of balance. Excessive drunkenness threatens the drinker’s equilibrium by causing him to lose enkrateia, the control of the senses and the body. The use of games of skill and dexterity – of which the kottabos is the best known – makes it possible to materialise, in a playful way, this tension at work in the symposion. However, these formalised games are only the visible part of a much wider semantic field of the balance, which unfolds in the image through graphic games that combine wine, vases and drinkers in scenes characterised by the imminence of falling. International audience

AbstractThe evolution and development of human mortuary behaviors is of enormous cultural significance. Here we report a richly-decorated young infant burial (AVH-1) from Arma Veirana (Liguria, northwestern Italy) that is directly dated to 10,211–9910 cal BP (95.4% probability), placing it within the early Holocene and therefore attributable to the early Mesolithic, a cultural period from which well-documented burials are exceedingly rare. Virtual dental histology, proteomics, and aDNA indicate that the infant was a 40–50 days old female. Associated artifacts indicate significant material and emotional investment in the child’s interment. The detailed biological profile of AVH-1 establishes the child as the earliest European near-neonate documented to be female. The Arma Veirana burial thus provides insight into sex/gender-based social status, funerary treatment, and the attribution of personhood to the youngest individuals among prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups and adds substantially to the scant data on mortuary practices from an important period in prehistory shortly following the end of the last Ice Age.

International audience

International audience; We argue that Chinese Sign Language (CSL) provides new insights into temporal anaphora, as well as new puzzles. Partee (1973) showed that temporal talk in English involves abstract anaphoric mechanisms akin to pronouns, although with a very different form. Schlenker (2013) argued that in American Sign Language (ASL), one and the same overt pronominal form, the pointing sign, can have individual and temporal uses, but his data involved the same loci across domains: no formal property distinguished temporal from individual anaphora. We replicate ASL temporal anaphora data in CSL, but we also display a new finding: CSL allows for locus establishment and anaphoric pointing on two specifically temporal timelines, a sagittal one (past is backwards) and a vertical one (past is up). Not only can temporal anaphora be overt in CSL; it can also be morphologically distinguished from nominal anaphora (various interesting restrictions on the timelines are also described).