ABSTRACT
The end of a century and the end of a millennium: it is in a context of global crisis – the collapse of great unifying paradigms and the general questioning of collective identities – that archaeology today is asked to reveal cultural specificities and nationalist traits. The discourse about women, on the other hand, appeared as a defence against the rise of fundamentalisms, and is essentially universalist. 1 At the same time, both the journey of women and the practice of archaeology in any given country are shaped by one and the same intellectual logic (that of a community organizing the way in which it sees the world). An examination of the role and the place of women in French archaeology is therefore primarily a question of French history and French sociology.
