Julie Gravier, Ph.D.

I am a Permanent Researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), in ThéMA Research Lab. I am a geographer and an archaeologist, and also work at the intersection with history and computer science through modelling approaches.

My research

I study long-term settlement dynamics. Two questions drive my research: why and how do settlement systems persist in the same places for extremely long periods of time? What is the political role of individuals and groups in perpetuating the social functioning and spatial organization of settlement systems? My aim is to understand the ways in which societies inhabit the world, taking into account very long-term dynamics and the temporal shifts in certain decisions on other processes. To achieve this, I study a wide range of chronological and cultural cases, mainly on local to macro-regional scales.