The research group AEGIS conducts its studies in Aegean Prehistory, essentially exploring ancient societies of the eastern Mediterranean from the Neolithic (6500-3100 BC) to the end of the Bronze Age (3100-1100 BC). Our researches especially focus on Cretan society, its material production and cultural impact.

Considered as the real cradle of European civilisation and located at the crossroads of Mediterranean exchanges, Crete has had a dramatic history of which the complexity feeds lively scholarly debates. This is even more pronounced that decipherable records that can be used for the reconstruction of society only date to a very late phase of the Bronze Age.

Through different projects, AEGIS develops a multidisciplinary approach of Protohistoric Cretan society: field archaeology is combined with spatial and architectural studies, geoarchaeological and paleoenvironmental approaches, ceramic and petrographic analyses as well as epistemological, anthropological and theoretical considerations.

By doing so, AEGIS aims to develop a diachronic approach to material production, societal structures and the economic and political realities of Minoan Crete. Our research group especially stresses complex network relations in which material production played a role. Through the study of practices and their representations, we aim to understand the different components of the society that brought them forward.