Our members

With more than 2,200 collaborators and researchers, Inrap is the largest archaeological research institute in France and one of the most important in Europe.

Each year, this national research institute realizes approximately 2,000 archaeological diagnostic operations and excavations in partnership with private and public developers in metropolitan France and its overseas territories. Created by the 2001 law on preventative archaeology, Inrap is the only public operator qualified to intervene throughout France and for all periods, from Prehistory to the present. Benefitting from thirty years of experience, it intervenes in all types of development projects: urban, rural, underwater, road and railway lines.
Following the excavations, Inrap teams study their results and ensure their diffusion to the scientific community: more than 300 of its researchers collaborate with the CNRS and Universities.The institute makes an essential contribution to the development of archaeological knowledge in collaboration with these organisms. With its large number of researchers, the broad range of its interventions and the massive quantity of data it collects, it plays a major role in many domains, notably those in which our knowledge has been profoundly renewed by preventative archaeology: the archaeology of human settlements and population movements, global approaches to local regions, the archaeology of human relationships to their environment, the study of economic fluctuations, etc.

The missions of Inrap also include the transmission of archaeological knowledge to the public. For this purpose, it organizes numerous outreach programs, most often in collaboration with the site developers: site visits, exhibits, publications, audiovisual productions, colloquia, etc.