CAPUT

The aim of this project is to study the social and cultural dynamics of a major city in the Roman West (1st c. BC/IIIth c. AD). Narbonne was chosen for this case study. As the first Roman colony outside Italy to deduct citizens (118 BC), then veterans (45 BC), capital of the province of Transalpine then Gallia Narbonensis, and "emporion of the whole of Celtic" (Strabo), there were many reasons for its attractiveness and influence. It was a major administrative, political and religious centre. Its openness to the sea and the commercial exchanges it hosted also made it a cosmopolitan cultural melting pot, attracting wealthy elites and working-class plebs alike. Together, they formed an original urban society, the characteristics of which the CAPUT project will define through the prism of human and social mobility and artistic transfers. The project will study and cross-reference the rich and little-studied documentation from Narbonne, which consists of a lapidary collection (2,000 blocks of inscriptions and/or sculpted reliefs), enriched by drawings and descriptions in antiquarian manuscripts, and the painted decorations in the domus of the Clos de la Lombarde. All these data are highly coherent, but have never been compared, even though they belong to the private sphere, which is the best place to find out about people's behaviour and cultural choices. For the first time on the scale of a provincial capital, the project will mobilize and cross-reference these different sources and, to put them into context, develop innovative analysis and visualization tools to characterize the networks, vectors and factors of exchange.