Le projet collectif Archéologie du Fait Urbain (AFU) : un nouvel espace de discussion

UMR 7041 ArScAn supports the establishment of "collective projects" in order to promote cross-fertilization of approaches among its own teams. The collective project "Archéologie du Fait Urbain" (AFU) is one of them. Created in 2018 to provide a place for methodological discussions on urban archaeology projects, its audience now extends well beyond the UMR. AFU organizes one or two study days per year on topics that correspond to problems frequently and increasingly faced by archaeologists working in urban contexts (data recovery from old excavations, surveys of structures in urban contexts, etc.). Since 2020, these topics are deeper explored during Matinales: a shorter, but more frequent moment of discussions. The success of these free discussion sessions (without any formal issues or judgments), as evidenced by the institutional as well as the geographical expansion of their audience, shows how much the opportunities for exchange on these questions are sorely lacking, particularly since the disappearance of the Centre national d’archéologie urbaine de Tours in 2014. The vitality of the AFU collective project reminds us, on its humble scale, of the urgent need to re-establish an inter-institutional structure to support urban archaeologists in their daily archaeological practice.