Dear Dominique Garcia,
Like Camus, you are a child of the Mediterranean.
Like the one who liked to say that “the living reality of the Mediterranean is not something new for us”, “that every time a doctrine has encountered the Mediterranean basin, in the resulting clash of ideas, it is always it that has remained intact”.[1] you have undertaken to explain the present through the remains of its past.
This «Mediterranean genius», to say it again like Camus, born from the unique encounter of history and geography, you have dedicated your career to reveal its origins.
Following in the footsteps of another child of the country, Camille Jullian, who has considerably renewed ancient history, you have devoted your work in the research laboratory that bears his name to shake up a number of preconceived ideas about the origins of the Mediterranean region. Contrary to the many hypotheses that make Mediterranean Gaul a secondary Celtic space, you decide the debate on the indigenous populations - Ligures or Celts. You show that the «Mediterranean Celtic», to use the title of one of your works, takes its name from the arrival of the Greek explorers-traders from the second half of the 7th century BC who named «Ligures» the populations of the North-Western Mediterranean and «Celtic» the space where they landed ². And you thus recall that ethnicity is a social phenomenon closely associated with cultural construction and economic dynamics.
A recognized researcher in a discipline that you help to impose in the French university field, you are also committed to ensuring its transmission and dissemination to the greatest number.
Lecturer at the University Paul Valéry de Montpellier, Lecturer and then Professor at the University of Provence, Aix-Marseille, you share your passion and expertise with generations of students whose vocation you encourage and support.
Passeur who carries high the values of his discipline, you are one of the great figures of archaeology whose excellence and diversity you embody since your work are at the crossroads of geography, history and archaeology.
You have helped to impose this discipline in the service of science and the general interest in the French institutional field. And you are committed to sustainably improving the conditions of practice and the scientific scope at the head of the Centre Camille Jullian from 2008 to 2011 and then at the Vice Presidency of the National Archaeological Research Centre (CNRA) since 2012.
More than a discipline whose career embodies excellence, it is a profession, a profession in which you are the voice and advocate. Even before starting the remarkable academic career that we know you, you are a contractual archaeologist, in direct contact with the field research at the School of Lattes, in particular, whose work you direct.
It is therefore on the strength of your intellectual authority and your professional experience in the field, and invested with a real sense of public service, that you have held the presidency of a committee responsible for scientific evaluation, economic and social aspects of preventive archaeology, which I have entrusted to you.
You have given me a precise and informed diagnosis in the form of a White Paper to better define the place and the role of preventive archaeology in the planning and definition of the orientations of research, but also monitoring and monitoring the study of archaeological heritage and its exploitation.
This contribution has enabled us to contribute to the archaeology component of the heritage bill to better take into account the heritage issues of today and tomorrow.
Dear Dominique Garcia, it is the researcher, the smuggler and the defender of a discipline at the heart of the scientific and technical issues of heritage and urban planning, that we distinguish today. An archaeologist at the service of knowledge and public interest to restore, explain and transmit the material remains of the existence of humanity. Through you, it is a discipline and a profession that the Republic honours. And it is to the whole archaeological community that it pays tribute.
Dear Dominique Garcia, on behalf of the President of the Republic and by virtue of the powers vested in us, we make you a Knight of the Legion of Honour.
[1] Camus, “Indigenous Culture - New Mediterranean Culture”,
inaugural conference of the House of Culture, 8 February 1937
² “Celtic” in Greek kellein, address.