This team’s objective is to increase our knowledge of the complex protohistoric societies of the Western Mediterranean through diverse projects studying the northern Iberian world, Mediterranean Gaul and North Africa. The research into the Western Mediterranean protohistoric societies aims to study in greater depth the processes of change that led local groups to become complex societies and eventually to form archaic states. Among its more concrete objectives is to study diverse settlements and burial sites and analyse the emergence of social inequality, competition for resources, demographic pressure, territorial forms of control and socio-political hierarchisation.

Another of this team’s objectives is to analyse contacts between cultures, from the point of view both of the influences and resistance to change and cultural hybridisation. The study areas encompass the Iberian world, Mediterranean Gaul and the Numidian civilisation, both in the formative periods of these cultures and during Romanisation. They also look at the origin, significance and evolution of the traditions that survived over the centuries. These include the cremation ritual, which spread across the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age and continues to this day, the rituals linked to domestic areas, and the transformation of foodstuffs documented in protohistory that can be considered the basis of the Mediterranean diet.