Valentine Roux
Valentine Roux (born 1956) is a French archaeologist specialising in ceramic production in the Levant between the 5th and 2nd millennium BCE with the aim of identifying the "evolutionary trajectories of ceramic traditions." Education and career. Roux was born in Belleville-sur-Saône in 1956. She studied prehistory at the University of Paris and obtained her doctorate in 1983. Her thesis was on the ethnoarchaeology of grinding material in Neolithic Mauritania. She has been affiliated with the CNRS since 1986, and was appointed a research director there in 2003. Roux's research "combines ethnoarchaeology in India and archaeology  in the Near East." She has devoted much research to developing "reference frameworks, whether about the diagnostic attributes of manufacturing techniques, their properties, the quantification of their constitutive components, the cognitive and motor skills involved, or, more recently, about the conditions favorable to their diffusion." Because her work demands collaborations among interdisciplinary researchers, she has worked and published with others in fields such as geosciences, economics, psychology and sociology. Roux has co-edited the "Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory" since 2019. Her book "Ceramics and Society: A Technological Approach to Archaeological Assemblages" (2019) "encourages archaeologists to approach processing and  recording pottery assemblages differently, moving away from a focus on typology towards understanding pottery from a technological perspective".