Jean-Claude Golvin et l’art de la restitution

Director of research at the CNRS, Jean-Claude Golvin successively served as Director of the South-West architecture office, Director of the franco-egyptian center at Karnak and Director of the French archaeological mission at Dougga.

During this rich career of work and important publications (in particular his state thesis entitled " L’amphithéâtre romain, essai sur la théorisation de sa forme et de ses fonctions "), Jean-Claude Golvin became one of the most premient specialists in ancient architecture and one of the few to know the monuments of pharaonic Egypt as well as those of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean.

Armed with this knowledge and this experience, when he joined the Ausonius Institute in 1993, Jean-Claude Golvin set himself a new challenge by concentrating his activity on the graphic restitution of vanished towns.

Rediscovering for the occasion the traditional tools of the architect, he initiated a theoretical reflection on the graphic representation of monuments and cities, which he conducted and refined for more than two decades. It resulted in the formulation of a method and the production of hundreds of plates representing the most important sites of the ancient world.

Scientific work carried out with leading specialists, these representations give a synthetic view of the current state of all knowledge relating to the architecture, town planning and environment of a city. Coming from disciplinary fields that are too often compartmentalized, the data is grouped together in a single composition and translated into an immediately intelligible graphic language.

This volume brings together 14 articles, written between 1993 and 2022, which describe the evolution of J.-C. Golvin's thinking and the definition of rules whose application makes it possible to produce, with all the reservations imposed by scientific rigour, the most satisfactory image we can conceive in the current state of our knowledge. The value of such a document is knowingly ephemeral, continually threatened by advances in research. However, for the first time, the definition and respect of a method of representation made it possible to produce large-scale series of reconstructions of ancient cities comparable to each other. PIcture of the state of our knowledge, the restitutions of Jean-Claude Golvin are so many invitations to travel, to discovery, to the transmission of knowledge and to the confrontation of approaches.

This volume is also the tribute paid by those who shared a moment in Jean-Claude Golvin's journey, who knew him as a teacher, colleague or student. By their contribution, they honour the researcher, whose frenetic activity as a draftsman has perhaps overshadowed, in recent years, the importance of a major scientific production, which extends from the field of Egyptology to from Roman show architecture to national archaeology. Throughout his career, he has never ceased to renew his activity, within the framework of countless collaborations with actors from all fields of archeology and heritage. The 15 contributions gathered here (we could easily have brought together ten times more) illustrate, in various fields, the importance of Jean-Claude Golvin's contribution to our discipline and, beyond his scientific work, the meaningful memories he leaves to all those who have had the pleasure of walking by his side.