Portrait of Coline Ruiz-Darasse in video, duration: 04:06

Chapters:

• What is your background? :0:12
• What is the purpose of your research? :1:03
• Focus on the ANR RIIG project – Computerized collection of Gallic inscriptions: 1:55

[Portrait]

Tell us about your journey

I have initial training in classics and philology.
I studied in prep class then did a double degree in classics and archeology at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail (the former name of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès). I have a master's degree in philology on Linear B and a DEA in Ancient Sciences on Paleohispanic inscriptions from the Valencian Country in Spain. These two academic works already focused on what structured my doctoral work: the inseparable link between material context, graphic context and literary or social context. After obtaining an aggregation in Classical Letters, I prepared my doctoral thesis at the IVth ^section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, under the direction of Pierre-Yves Lambert as well as at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid where I was a scientific member for two years.
My thesis dealt with the contacts and exchanges between the Celtic and Iberian populations of the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula and the south of Gaul, between 5th ^and 1st ^AD . This work aimed to better understand the phonetics of the Iberian language by the adaptations of foreign names to this writing and to study the exchange networks on both sides of the Pyrenees. For 5 years, I was responsible for publication at the Académie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris before being recruited at the CNRS in 2014.

What are the research themes you work on?

I work on linguistic and graphic contacts and cultural exchanges in Western Europe during recent protohistory.
Concretely, it is a question of understanding the conditions of appearance of writing, its areas of use and its diffusion within the framework of documentary corpora attested in a fragmentary manner. I focus primarily on paleohispanic files, that is to say the languages ​​and writings present in the Iberian Peninsula before the Roman conquest and until the turn of the era, and for several years also on the corpus of continental Celtic with a project to computerize inscriptions in the Gallic language.
My work has thus been enriched with skills in digital humanities, which partly renews working and data processing methods. I am particularly interested in questions relating to the diffusion of graphic know-how and the logic of writing among populations whose structures are not necessarily those of the Greco-Latin world. Work on epigraphic corpora of fragmentary attestation involves permanent doubt and flexibility of mind in order to regularly re-examine the elements so that they can ultimately draw a coherent and relevant system, without ever straining the documentation available. .

What are the big questions that motivate researchers on your research theme?

While the reference to “our ancestors the Gauls” is almost daily in France, interest in the Gallic language as it is actually attested is very limited. The public is most often unaware that the Gauls wrote (in reality they used several different graphic systems) but it is always very sensitive to any subject relating to it. Whether it is because of Asterix or this abusive and simplistic identification of the French with the Gaul (which is in reality a vestige of a moment of propaganda from the end of the 19th ^century at the time of the war between France and Prussia ), there is an almost emotional dimension to the audience when we speak of the Gallic language in France.
However, this is to ignore the history of the French language which is much more linked to Latin than to Gaulish (of which barely more than a hundred terms could have reached us) and the multitude of influences and contacts (novels, Germanic or even Arabic) during the evolution of the French language and culture. Returning to the texts, returning to the data as it was transmitted to us by analyzing it in the most complete way possible is a way of avoiding the amalgamations and ideological biases which may have marked the image of the Gaulish.

Are there any questions or work you would like to present to us?

I worked for 15 years on the epigraphy of an exceptional site.
This is the Ensérune site in Hérault. It is a site very well known to Protohistorians because it is a “crossroads of civilizations” to use the subtitle of the reference monograph of the site, published in 1955. In addition to the fact that it is an oppidum ideally located, the almost century of excavations which took place there accompanied a real revolution in the way of perceiving the southern protohistoric world. A Latin culture and a well-identified Celtic group are mixed with very clear Iberian influences, notably with a very significant Iberian presence in the epigraphy.
This site presents hundreds of inscriptions depicting a complex linguistic landscape with all-round exchanges (Greek, Latin, Etruscan, Celtic, Iberian) but especially with the north of present-day Spain. My interest and my wonder is to be able to reconstruct, from small fragments (a few names, a few texts which are almost neither understood nor deciphered), a complete picture of the social structure which left these written traces. This is the same thing that happens for the Gallic domain, with the possibility of having points of comparison with other neighboring or related languages.

Are there any questions that remain enigmas for you or that you would like to explore further?

There are so many questions that remain enigmas for me! What made certain populations decide to use writing and others not? Why did the Gauls, even though they had been in contact with the Greek world since the founding of Marseille in 600 BC, wait more than three centuries to master writing? How could individuals on the shores of the western Mediterranean, for example, talk to each other in the 3rd ^century ?
How does the Iberian language work and what is written on the Ensérune lead? And above all, how were these names really pronounced, of which we have fleeting traces? In reality, the field of epigraphy of fragmentary languages ​​is a vast network of often insoluble questions that must be kept in mind until a new element or a new combination of hypotheses arises.
Another issue that I would like to explore in more depth in the years to come concerns the writing itself and the graphic gesture. How do we write, how do we learn to write, what makes an inscription a text and not a simple scribble? What happens when you want to write and how do you get your message across in writing?

What are your activities as a researcher in pre-Roman epigraphy?

My daily life is perfectly mundane: I try to understand things by reading articles, writing others and exchanging working hypotheses with colleagues.
I favor the return to the materiality of the texts so I endeavor to see the objects inscribed, to describe them, to describe the context of use and discovery. This involves interacting as much as possible with a large number of colleagues, including archaeologists, linguists, sociolinguists, epigraphists, literary scholars, etc. The work of studying and editing the inscriptions is done either in a traditional written form or, as in the framework of the ANR project that I direct, by also processing the data in a computerized manner. This involves preparing documents using a new language, the EpiDoc schema, with particular attention to the principles of open science and data interoperability. Despite everything, I spend a lot of time looking for funding to extend this research and to allow colleagues to train in order to be able to deal with each person's renewed skills.