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Gabriel Camps | |
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| Born | 20 May 1927 |
| Died | 6 September 2002(2002-09-06) (aged 75) |
| Occupation(s) | archaeologist and social anthropologist |
Gabriel Camps (May 20, 1927 – September 6, 2002)[1] was a French archaeologist and social anthropologist, the founder of theEncyclopédie berbère and is considered a prestigious scholar on the history of theBerber people.[2]
Gabriel Camps was born inMisserghin,French Algeria. He attended secondary school inOran, and studied later inAlgiers. In 1961, he graduated fromAlgiers University with a PhD thesis about theprotohistorical monuments andburial rites of Berber people, calledAux origines de la Berbérie.Monuments et rites funéraires protohistoriques, as well as with a second thesis on theNumidian kingMasinissa.[3]
In 1959, Gabriel Camps entered theFrench National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). After the independence of Algeria, he worked from 1962 to 1969 as director of the Centre de recherches anthropologiques, préhistoriques et ethnologiques (CRAPE) and of theNational Ethnographic and Prehistoric Museum of Bardo at Algiers. He also directed the Institut de recherches sahariennes and the scientific journalLibyca.
In 1969, he moved toAix-en-Provence, where he worked as professor at theUniversity of Provence. There he founded the Laboratoire d'anthropologie et de préhistoire de la Méditerranée occidentale (LAPMO), frequented by numerous students, mostly from Maghreb countries.[3]
Gabriel Camps undertook research and published on the prehistoric and pre-Roman epochs of North Africa, but also on the Berber kingdoms, the Libyan script and thePunic people. Most of this work focussed on Berber history, and in 1984 he was the founder and first editor-in-chief of theEncyclopédie berbère, launched under the aegis of UNESCO. The largest part of Camps's research was done on Algeria, although he worked also onCorsica.
His wife, Henriette Camps-Fabrer (1928-2015) was a Frenchcultural anthropologist and wrote several books about thejewellery of the Berbers in Algeria and the Maghreb between the 1970s and 1990.[4]
Camps died in 2002 in Aix-en-Provence; on his death, the Algerian Minister of Culture expressed his condolences to the University.[5]
