Francois Audouze (1943 - 2024)
By Jean-Paul Demoule and Nathan Schlanger
Our colleague the French prehistorian Françoise Audouze passed away on 12 August 2024. A member of the EAA executive Board from 1997 to 2003, she was in charge of the organisation of the EAA's 10th annual meeting in Lyon in 2004, the only time to date that EAA meetings were held in France. Together with Jacques Lasfargue, director of the Rhône-Alpes regional archaeological service, she ensured that the conference unfolded in excellent conditions, taking advantage of the venerable archaeological history of Lyon, the capital of Gaul in Roman times.
Born in 1943, Françoise Audouze studied prehistory at the Sorbonne with André Leroi-Gourhan, the most innovative French prehistorian of his time. Her first interest was in the Bronze Age, of which there were at that time very few specialists in France: following her thesis on this topic, she was recruited by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). In addition to her own research, she took part in two major surveys of Bronze Age artefacts, the
Prähistorische Bronzefunde, coordinated by Hermann Müller-Karpe in Germany, and the series
typologies de l’âge du Bronze en France, launched by the
Société préhistorique française. And it was on this same subject that she taught from 1975 to 2000 at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, so as to broaden the protohistory curricula from its main focus on the Neolithic and Iron Age periods. The seminar she later taught in Nanterre on “the archaeology of technology” (with Sander van der Leeuw and Nathan Schlanger) did much to strengthen the interdisciplinary character and the theoretical ambitions of the study of techniques,
à la française. In this respect, her 2002 article on “Leroi-Gourhan, a Philosopher of Technique and Evolution” proved influential in presenting the thrust of this research tradition to an English-reading scholarly audience.
Such initiatives helped considerably to disprove the label of “continental insularity” long stuck, with considerable justification, to French archaeology. Indeed Françoise played an active role in modernising French archaeology, which had a venerable tradition of research in the Mediterranean “cradles of civilisation” in Greece, Italy, the Near East and Egypt, but which remained for long underdeveloped on French soil. There, even as late as the 1970s, most archaeological excavations were carried out by enthusiastic amateurs, with only limited resources, uncertain professional standards and loose legal frameworks. In 1979, together with Anick Coudart, Alain Schnapp and Jean-Paul Demoule, among others, Françoise was one of the founders of the militant journal
Les Nouvelles de l'Archéologie, which played a key role in mobilising French archaeologists and in bringing about a number of essential scientific and organisational reforms, including the proper establishment of preventive archaeology as a research oriented public service. From 1987 to 1998, she also took on the direction of the CNRS archaeological research centre at Valbonne near Nice, which federated a network of some twenty teams spread across France.
While Françoise initially undertook several archaeological digs on Bronze and Iron Age sites, her main excavation project, lasting from 1976 until 2009, was at Verberie, a major Magdalenian settlement on the banks of the River Oise. She extended there the methodologies developed by Leroi-Gourhan at the famous Upper Palaeolithic site of Pincevent, particularly with regards to environmental sciences, studies of seasonality, fauna and spatial analysis, the whole resulting in numerous publications. In addition to her European connections, Françoise had also many scientific links with women researchers in the United States, and shared their interests in questions of gender and the archaeology of childhood. She took an active part in the annual meetings of the Society for American Archaeology and taught at the University of Illinois and the University of California in 1997 and 1998.
In recent years, before her health declined, she set to complete the research and publication of the data accumulated from her excavations at Verberie, but she also found the time to support an NGO in Bangladesh. She will be sorely missed for her spirit, at once incisive and open-minded, as well as the encouragements she knew to give to students and younger colleagues, in France and abroad.