Integral Artin motives I: Smooth objects and the ordinary t-structure

Abstract

We link smooth Artin motives to étale local systems and Artin representations. We then construct the ordinary motivic t-structure on Artin motives with integral coefficients and show that the $\ell$-adic realization functor is t-exact.

46 pages, comments welcome; the original text was split in two parts (this is the first one). Some of the first sections containing only background material already present in the literature were removed