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While the planet Mars is today a dry and cold wasteland dominated by aeolian processes, a large diversity of geomorphologies observed from orbit suggests that aqueous processes took place there. Most of these morphologies implies the presence of developed fluvial networks at the surface of the planet about 3.5 Ga ago. However, the precise conditions behind the formation of these valleys and the climate they evolved in are still being debated, as some of them could be linked to episodic events set in a cold climate. For more than a decade now, the rovers Curiosity and Perseverance helped to shed light on these questions thanks to a detailed in situ analysis of fluvial and lacustrine deposits.The Curiosity rover landed in August 2012 in Gale crater, and since then observed more than 500 meters of a sedimentary succession including lacustrine mudstones and fluvial sandstones and conglomerates. Locally, clay minerals have been observed to make as much as 30 % of the bulk composition, with a substantial degree of chemical alteration, highlighting the role of water in the rock formation processes. The succession, and locally alternation and interfingering of fluvial and lacustrine facies suggest rapid and marked evolutions of the depositional setting, in relation with changing environmental and climatic parameters. However, no (peri-)glacial facies has been found to date, even if glacial processes could have affected those terrains later in their history.In February 2021, the Perseverance rover landed in Jezero crater, which was chosen after the observation from orbit of both a large-scale fan-shaped edifice and the presence of clay and carbonate minerals. Remote observations of the fan and its remnants allowed to identify characteristic sigmoid structures of a deltaic architecture (bottomsets-foresets-topsets), confirming the presence of a perennial lake at the time of the deposition. Observations from both rovers illustrate that liquid water was not ephemeral at the surface of Mars. Nevertheless, the duration and extent of these processes are still yet to be exactly constrained. The detailed analysis of the delta by Perseverance and the returned samples on Earth (by a future mission early in the 2030’s) would hopefully allow to constrain these chronological questions, as well as to allow to look for potential biosignatures. International audience

The unprecedented success of image reconstruction approaches based on deep neural networks has revolutionised both the processing and the analysis paradigms in several applied disciplines. In the field of digital humanities, the task of digital reconstruction of ancient frescoes is particularly challenging due to the scarce amount of available training data caused by ageing, wear, tear and retouching over time. To overcome these difficulties, we consider the Deep Image Prior (DIP) inpainting approach which computes appropriate reconstructions by relying on the progressive updating of an untrained convolutional neural network so as to match the reliable piece of information in the image at hand while promoting regularisation elsewhere. In comparison with state-of-the-art approaches (based on variational/PDEs and patch-based methods), DIP-based inpainting reduces artefacts and better adapts to contextual/non-local information, thus providing a valuable and effective tool for art historians. As a case study, we apply such approach to reconstruct missing image contents in a dataset of highly damaged digital images of medieval paintings located into several chapels in the Mediterranean Alpine Arc and provide a detailed description on how visible and invisible (e.g., infrared) information can be integrated for identifying and reconstructing damaged image regions. Comment: 26 pages

So-called ‘forgotten’ or ‘orphan’ crops are an important component of strategies aimed at preserving and promoting biodiversity. Knowledge of historical cultivation, usage, and geographic and evolutionary trajectories of plants, that is, crop history research, is important for the long-term success of such efforts. However, research biases in the crops chosen for study may present hurdles. This review attempts to systematically identify patterns in crop species representativeness within archaeology-based crop history research. A meta-analysis and synthesis of archaeo- botanical evidence (and lack thereof) is presented for 268 species known to have been cultivated for food prior to 1492 CE from the Mediterranean region to South Asia. We identified 39 genera with known crop plants in this geographical and histor- ical context that are currently absent from its archaeobotanical record, constituting ‘orphan’ crops of archaeobotany. In addition, a worldwide synthesis of crop species studied using geometric morphometric, archaeogenetic and stable isotope analyses of archaeological plant remains is presented, and biases in the species represented in these disciplines are discussed. Both disciplinary methodological biases and economic agenda-based biases affecting species representativeness in crop history research are apparent. This study also highlights the limited geographic diffusion of most crops and the potential for deeper historical perspectives on how crops become marginal- ized and ‘forgotten’. L'agrobiodiversité est un puissant levier d'action de l'agriculture durable à l'échelle mondiale. La culture, la conservation et la réintroduction de diverses espèces végétales, y compris les cultures ‘oubliées’ et ‘sous-utilisées’, contribuent à l'agrobiodiversité mondiale, aux écosystèmes vivants et à la production alimentaire durable. Ces actions bénéficient des connaissances traditionnelles et historiques des trajectoires évolutives et culturelles des plantes cultivées. Cette étude représente une première tentative de mesure systématique de la représentativité des espèces dans les études des restes archéologiques de plantes. Les résultats indiquent que, en plus des sources de biais méthodologiques spécifiques à la discipline, les biais agricoles modernes peuvent se répliquer dans la recherche sur l'histoire des cultures et influencer la compréhension des ‘cultures oubliées’. Reconnaître ces biais est un premier pas vers leur rectification et la promotion de l'agrobiodiversité dans la recherche et les applications pratiques. International audience

Abstract The development of innovative solutions for the conservation and the protection of historic aircraft is a recent and important issue raised in the cultural heritage field and represents the goal of the PROCRAFT (Protection and Conservation of Heritage Aircraft) project. Assessing and documenting the constituent materials as well as their degradation state is necessary to determine and understand factors inducing aluminium alloy corrosion, in order to develop tailored conservation treatments and identify effective protective coatings. The first step of the project was the identification of the constituent materials of aircraft wrecks. Al-Cu-Mg alloys—Duralumin and Super Duralumin, with a higher content of Mg—were the most employed alloys for structural and non-structural parts. These materials undergo a wide range of alterations, amongst which pitting, exfoliation and galvanic corrosion. In the present work, results of the characterisation of wrecks from a North American Republic P-47D Thunderbolt, crashed in Italy in 1945, are reported and compared to wrecks from a French Breguet 765 Sahara n°504 64-PH, built in 1958. The constituent alloys resulted to be similar to the modern 2024 and 2017A alloy. In order to assess the representativeness of these modern alloys in simulating the corrosion behaviour of the historic ones, exfoliation susceptibility (ASTM G34) as well as non-destructive and destructive electrochemical tests in 0.1 M NaCl were carried out on both historic and modern alloys. These results contributed to the selection of representative substrates for the development of protective coatings as well as to the expansion of the dataset on composition and microstructure of historic Al alloys for aircraft. International audience

Abstract Hundreds of thousands of Greek and Latin inscriptions from the Roman world have survived until today, scattered across all continents and spanning fifteen centuries of ancient history. Epigraphic documents constitute an essential source of evidence for our knowledge of the ancient world and can be considered an authentic repository of big data. However, a significant number of inscriptions have not been preserved in their material form. In fact, their texts can only be recovered thanks to the so-called epigraphic manuscripts: crucial documents consisting of handwritten transcriptions made in post-classical times. In spite of their importance, these manuscripts have seldom received sufficient scholarly attention, and use of state-of-the-art digital tools for the study of the transcribed inscriptions is completely lacking. EpiSearch is a pilot project that explores the application of technologies deployed in the field of the Digital Humanities to recover the epigraphic evidence found in epigraphic manuscripts. Each step of the project is intended as a proof of concept, in view of a future large-scale and collaborative research plan. As a sample, we chose an epigraphic manuscript composed by the Venetian ecclesiastical antiquarian Giovanni Antonio Astori (1672-1743) and preserved in the Marciana Library in Venice: Marc. Lat. XIV, 200 (4336). Within this broader framework, this article focuses on the characteristics of Astori's manuscript and on the possibilities offered by Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) to improve its study. The application of HTR to epigraphic manuscripts is a challenging task, given the nature and graphic layout of these texts. However, our research shows that, even with some limits, HTR technologies can be used successfully, especially to map legacy manual transcriptions on the manuscript facsimile and to improve the layout analysis of the document. These results will be used for one of the final goals of the EpiSearch project, that is the design of an Open Access web application for allowing users to browse the manuscript, which will be visually annotated and connected to the main online resources for digital epigraph.

AbstractIn this introduction to the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy special issue “Advanced Raman procedures applied to natural/cultural heritage and forensic questions: Mobile set‐up, data treatment and associated techniques,” the aim is to assess the state of the art in the field and to highlight potential new perspectives. The novel approaches employed in the published papers are described and can be grouped as such: application of multivariate statistical analysis to Raman spectra, use of mobile instrumentations directly in situ for both cultural and forensic contexts, tackling with optics and spectral range issues, and coupling with mobile instrumentations based on different analytical techniques.

Abstract The record of past human adaptations provides crucial lessons for guiding responses to crises in the future. To date, there have been no systematic global comparisons of humans’ ability to absorb and recover from disturbances through time. We present results of the first attempt to synthesise resilience across a broad sample of prehistoric population time frequency data, spanning 30,000 years of human history. Cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis of population decline show that frequent disturbances enhance a population’s capacity to resist and recover from later downturns. Land use patterns are important mediators of the strength of this positive association: farming and herding societies are more vulnerable but also more resilient overall. The results show that important trade-offs exist when adopting novel or alternate land use strategies.