Last October, the Cultur-Monts consortium held its 4th meeting in Le Mont-Dore (Puy-de-Dôme, France). It was the presentation of the project in the French window, organised by the Mairie de Le Mont-Dore, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme de Clermont-Ferrand (UCA) and the Institut d’Auvergne-Rhône-Alps du Développement des Territorires (IADT), beneficiary partners of the project.
As usual, this meeting combined internal work sessions with field trips to discover the tangible and intangible heritage of the Massif du Sancy as a mountain cultural landscape.
During the working sessions, the progress of the working teams in the 3 WGs was shared; and the details of the French pilot windows of the Sancy and the Lozère were presented by the teams of the MSH Clermont-Ferrand (UCA) and the associated partners of the Lozère Department, in collaboration with the IADT.
The interdisciplinary proposal presented by Bertrand Dousteyssier, Patrice Fournet, Jean-Pierre Toumazet and Franck Vautier (MSH-UCA) on the methodologies for the valorisation of a unique heritage such as the ‘tras’, linked to mid-mountain livestock farming and the production of the famous Saint Nectaire cheese (PDO), aroused great interest.
The MSH-UCA team will combine archaeology, documentary research, Lidar technology and artificial intelligence to enhance the value of the ‘structure en peigne’ of the Sancy, through a second phase of the Lidarcheo 2.0 project.
The combination of LIDAR images with methods of automatic detection of archaeological structures, based on artificial intelligence (signal processing algorithm) will allow:
1.Map the structures in order to valorise and preserve them.
2. Compare this information with other data (altitude, slope, proximity to water sources) to better understand the logic of their location.
3. Analyse and decipher the variability of their forms.
A complete itinerary through the territory allowed the members of the Cultur-Monts team to meet the main local agents at first hand: active producers-breeders, mountain cultural tourism companies, cultural institutions, thermal centres and local authorities. In this respect, it is worth mentioning:
The meeting with Sébastien Ramade, president of the Saint-Nectaire PDO and owner of the GAEC des Estives farm (Murat-le-Quaire). He explained in detail the entire cheese production cycle and the current farming practices.
The guided tour offered by the company Auvergn’Attitude to the Banne d’Ordanche, where they have rebuilt an old pastoral structure (tras) to show the heritage linked to the historical livestock activity of the Massif du Sancy.
The visit to the municipality of Murat-le-Quaire, where Mr. Jean-François Cassier, its mayor, explained the important revitalisation that his town has undergone in recent years, not only linked to tourism, and what are the main challenges to fix the new population in the territory, the most important of which is affordable housing. We also discovered the proposal of the ScénoMusée de la Toinette & de Julien, a heritage space focused on the interpretation of the rural world of the Sancy, where you can currently visit the recreation of a traditional ‘buron’ of the Auvergne and the rural ways of life.
The fieldwork also made it possible to focus on the forms of heritage of the thermal archaeology of Le Mont-Dore, characterised by monumental remains from the Roman period scattered throughout various buildings and sites in the municipality.
We visited the beautiful thermal complex of Le Mont-Dore, where we were welcomed by its director, Mrs. Séverine Thomas-Gardet, and Patrick Briet. Elise Nectoux, from the Direction régionale des Affaires Culturelles, showed us the Roman remains preserved there and detailed the methodological proposal for the 3D reconstruction of the entire ancient thermal complex planned within the framework of the Cultur-Monts project.
We also visited the remains of the historical quarry of Le Capucin, which has been exploited since Roman times, and we went to the quarry des Grands Moulins to learn about the current extraction techniques.
The archaeological itinerary of heritage discovery concluded with a visit to different pastoral structures (tras) located in the emblematic enclave of the Col de la Croix Morand; and with a walk along the Croix Morand and Tache paths, where the MSH-UCA researcher, Bertrand Dousteyssier, explained the research programme on the Roman road from Clermont to Le Mont-Dore in progress and the important archaeological results that are being obtained.
Here is a video summary of the meeting:
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