François-Xavier Fauvelle was born in 1968. After completing post-graduate studies in philosophy and history, he defended his doctoral thesis in African history at the University of Paris-I-Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1999, under the supervision of Jean Boulègue. In 2002, he was recruited by the CNRS and assigned to the Institut d'études africaines in Aix-en-Provence. In the course of his career, he has spent several long periods abroad: in the USA in 1996-1997 (as Scholar Affiliate at the University of Iowa), in Ethiopia in 2000-2001 (as postdoctoral researcher at the French Center for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa), in South Africa in 2005-2006 (as CNRS researcher at the French Institute of South Africa in Johannesburg), again in Ethiopia in 2006-2009 (as Director of the French Center for Ethiopian Studies), in the USA as Visiting Professor at Princeton University in 2020. In France, he joined the TRACES Laboratory at the University of Toulouse-II-Jean-Jaurès in 2009 , which he directed from 2013 to 2017 and where he hosted the 23rd^Congress of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists in 2016, as Chairman of the organizing committee. In the same laboratory, with François Bon and Caroline Robion-Brunner, he created the Pôle Afrique, the main team in France bringing together Africanist archaeologists and doctoral students. François-Xavier Fauvelle will be elected Professor at the Collège de France in 2019.