As part of her residency at the Maison Française d’Oxford, Sandrine Robert, Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and member of the Géographie-cités research unit, will give two lectures on 21 November and 4 December.
Concepts and tools for analysing the resilience of landscape forms: the contribution of the French school of archaeogeography
Friday 21 November 2025
5.30pm
Kellogg College
Mawby Room
Free – No booking required
Open to: Members of Kellogg College, the public.
The French school of archaeogeography has been developed since the 1990s through contact with development-led archaeology. It combines different traditions of morphological analysis, photo-interpretation and landscape archaeology, drawing on the disciplines of history, archaeology and geography. Overcoming the nature-culture divide in landscape analysis, archaeogeography is based on a systems approach and recognition of the hybrid nature of landscape forms.
This seminar will present the concepts and methods developed in archaeogeography in recent years. In particular, these have resulted in a more quantitative approach to morphological analysis. Examples will be gathered mainly from French rural and urban fields.
Water as a morphogen for landscape forms, some examples in France
4 December
5:15 p.m.
Maison Française d’Oxford
Water circulation is a determining factor in the organisation and resilience of the landscape in the long term. We will examine this through recent work carried out by the Time Machine project consortium, IR Humanum CNRS and The Water Factory, such as an ancient meander of the Seine, whose shape is still visible in the urban fabric of Paris, or the landscapes of Pyrenean summer pastures structured by irrigation.
An archaeologist and geographer, Sandrine Robert is Director of Studies at EHESS, where she previously led the Master’s programme Territoires et Développement. Her research focuses on the long-term resilience of landscapes. Drawing on an archaeogeographical approach, she studies landscapes as self-organising systems that are transmitted through time via their multiple reappropriations by societies.
In recent years, she has been working on the conceptual framework of ecological resilience, identifying within landscapes both the slow processes of transmission and, conversely, the deep and lasting transitions that transform them.
Her work pays particular attention to circulations—such as roads and water flows—as key drivers in the structuring and resilience of landscapes.
She is the author of La résilience, persistance et changement dans les formes du paysage (London: ISTE Editions, 2021; English edition published by Wiley, 2021), based on her habilitation thesis defended in 2020.
She is the founder and former president of the Theory and Method in Landscape Archaeology – Archaeogeography Commission of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (IUPPS), and co-leads the research group Long-Term Settlement Systems within the Laboratory of Excellence Dynamiques Territoriales et Spatiales (LabEx DynamiTe).
She is a member of the Géographie-cités research unit, which is jointly supervised by the EHESS, the CNRS, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, and Université Paris Cité.
