Conques-en-Rouergue is visited each year by thousands of pilgrims. Object and monuments from this site are extremely well-known all around the planet in art historical circles. Paradoxically, this general fame does not correspond to deep scholarly attention. Moreover, while being one of the major sites of world heritage, its importance in the public space remains marginal. The main challenge of this project is thus to promote the first interdisciplinary integrative research on the site, combining the expertise from five different fields. The complex understanding of this unique site of memory is indispensable for both scientific community and large audience. We will:

1) close significant research gaps about an outstanding heritage site which allows to understand crucial stages in its medieval construction, but also in the 19th and 20th century “re-invention” of the European Middle Ages. Thanks to its unique preservation of visual, historical, material, and ritual cultures – from the 9th to the 21st century – investigating Conques means to understand and reconstruct crucial elements in the development of European culture.
2) break new ground in different disciplines by gathering empirical data relative to the site, submitting it to classic and experimental methods of research stemming from all the individual involved fields – art history, history, archaeometry, acoustics, and philology. This should enable the transfer of knowledge between and within an international community of experts, and with a site of cultural and immaterial heritage. In doing so, we wish to create a community capable to analyze this singular site. In doing so we also wish to uncover the mechanisms at the background of the shared European culture.
3) produce a long overdue monographic and transdisciplinary analysis of this complex place of medieval cultures.
4) establish an integrative protocol of research, i.e. the systematic and coherent combination of the various disciplinary know-how and knowledge specific to the diverse partners. The latter will be validated on the basis of the study of Conques and its material heritage but aims at being transferable and exploitable in other contexts through its modularity. Such a protocol will be overpassing – also on a theoretical basis – the mono-disciplinary approach.

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