Sandrine Robert

Sandrine Robert is an archaeologist and Director of Studies at EHESS in the Géographie-cités laboratory. She has served as Vice President for Teaching and Student Life at EHESS and as a member of the scientific council of TGIR Huma-Num CNRS. She created and chaired the commission “Theory and Method in Landscape Archaeology – Archaeogeography” at the Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (IUPPS). She is currently a member of the Scientific Council of MSH-Dijon – University of Burgundy. She co-directs the group “Long-term Settlement Systems” at LabEx DynamiTe and is a member of the steering committee of the CNRS Time Machine Project consortium and the EHESS Archaeology and Social Sciences program (Archéoss).

Her research focuses on the resilience of landscapes over the long term. Using an archaeogeographical approach, she studies landscapes as self-organizing systems in which the persistence of forms is not simply a matter of inertia but rather a dynamic fueled by social reappropriation. In her habilitation thesis, published under the title Resilience: Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms, she explored the application of the concept of resilience—first theorized by ecologists—to landscapes. In her work, she highlights the decisive role of circulation, particularly unbuilt roads and water, in the structuring and resilience of landscapes over time. Her fieldwork, connected to the Time Machine Project consortium, currently focuses on circulation networks in the Paris Basin and on gravitational hydraulic systems in the Adour Valley (Hautes-Pyrénées), at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte, and at Royaumont Abbey.

In Oxford, she is working on the translation of Tim Ingold’s text The Temporality of the Landscape, in which he explores the relationship between societies and their space from the perspective of “dwelling” and “taskscape.” The Temporality of the Landscape is one of the seminal texts in landscape archaeology developed within post-processual archaeology in the 1990s. It sheds light on the development of Tim Ingold’s later work on the concept of meshwork—a way of understanding the world as an interweaving of movements, circulations, and paths performed by humans, animals, and more-than-humans. Sandrine Robert is studying the context in which Tim Ingold produced the text in 1993 and examining its reception up to the present day.

Last publications:

Robert S., « Une cartographie hybride des paysages : la carte compilée », dans Denis Delbaere dir. Le paysage est un projet. Ménager les territoires. Hermann, 2024, p. 115-121

Robert S., La résilience, persistance et changement dans les formes du paysage, ISTE, Londres, 2021, 275 p., translated in english Resilience: Persistence and Change in Landscape Forms. London, ISTE, Wiley, 2022

Robert S., « Vers un nouveau modèle analytique en archéologie routière », Revue Archéologique de Narbonnaise, 49, 2021, p. 477-491

Robert S., Applying the Concept of Panarchy in Archaeogeography: the Example of Route Resilience in the Longue Durée, Revue Archéologie, Société et Environnement, ISTE- OpenScience, 2021, 9 p., DOI : 10.21494/ISTE.OP.2021.0614