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The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population history of European black rats, we generated a de novo genome assembly of the black rat, 67 ancient black rat mitogenomes and 36 ancient nuclear genomes from sites spanning the 1st-17th centuries CE in Europe and North Africa. Analyses of mitochondrial DNA confirm that black rats were introduced into the Mediterranean and Europe from Southwest Asia. Genomic analyses of the ancient rats reveal a population turnover in temperate Europe between the 6th and 10th centuries CE, coincident with an archaeologically attested decline in the black rat population. The near disappearance and re-emergence of black rats in Europe may have been the result of the breakdown of the Roman Empire, the First Plague Pandemic, and/or post-Roman climatic cooling., We thank the wet laboratory teams at MPI-SHH, the PalaeoBARN at the University of Oxford and the University of York. We thank David K. James and Lucia Hui of the Alameda County Vector Control Services District for procuring the rat used for the de novo genome. We are grateful to Sarah Nagel at Max Planck Institute for the Evolutionary Anthropology for the single-stranded library preparation, and Dovetail Genomics for the de novo genome assembly service. We thank Maria Spyrou for her suggestions and comments. We acknowledge Ewan Chipping and Helena England (University of York), Carl Phillips, Veronica Lindholm (Ålands Museum), Christine McDonnell and Nienke van Doorn (York Archaeological Trust), Emile Mittendorf (Gemeente Deventer), Inge Riemersma (Archaeological depot, Provincie Zuid-Holland), the Turkish Ministry of Culture & Tourism, Jan Frolík and Iva Herichová (Institute of Archaeology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague), Franz Humer and Eduard Pollhammer (Archaeological Park Carnuntum), Dorottya B. Nyékhelyi and László Daróczi-Szabó (Budapest History Museum), Institut National du Patrimoine (Tunisia), University of Barcelona, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Project HUM2006-03432/HIST), Spanish Ministry of Culture (program of archaeological excavations abroad 2009); Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for the Development (2009), Catalan Institute of Classical Archaeology (ICAC), Vujadin Ivanisević, Nemanja Marković and Ivan Bugarski (Archaeological Institute 809 Belgrade), the Field Museum Chicago, the British National History Museum and the American Museum of Natural History for providing materials and support. G.L. and A.J. were supported by the ERC (grant ERC-2013-StG-337574-UNDEAD) and A.J. was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council Doctoral Training Program. D.O. was supported by Wellcome (Small Grant in Humanities and Social Science 209817/Z) and the British Academy / Leverhulme Trust (Small Research Grant SG170938). E.R. was supported by Estonian Research Council grant No PRG29. R.K. was supported by the Czech Academy of Sciences institutional support (RVO:67985912). S.V.-L. was supported by the ERC (grant ERC-StG- 716298 ZooMWest). H.E. was funded by an ERC grant (206148) through the Sealinks Project. A.H.B was funded by the Leverhulme Trust (ECF-2017-315). The de novo genome assembly, population genomics study, and radiocarbon dating were funded by the Max Planck Society.

L’activité de recherche menée par notre équipe comprend des travaux de fouille mais surtout de prospection. Les premiers ont déjà été publiés pour la plupart d’entre eux, se rapportant précisément aux monuments 42, 53 et 647 (Kallala et al. 2014) et au dolmen SP370005 (Jornet, Fadrique et Sanmartí 2011) ; nous présentons dans ce volume un condensé des résultats obtenus. Nous y incorporons également les fouilles, encore inédites, de la bazina 241 et d’un petit secteur d’une structure singulière (nº 1054) que nous avons appelée « le Grand mur ». Pour ce qui est des travaux de prospection que nous avons menés depuis 2009 dans une partie importante du massif du Ksour, nous nous limiterons dans ce chapitre à en décrire la méthode de travail. Le lecteur trouvera à la fin de cet ouvrage l’inventaire complet des restes archéologiques documentés – des monuments funéraires d’époque protohistorique pour la plupart –, accompagné d’une série de photographies