Originally from the village of Hastingues in the Landes region of France, Thibaud Poigt has been interested in the material remains of ancient times ever since he was a child. After studying science at secondary school, he joined the History of Art and Archaeology degree course at Bordeaux Montaigne University in 2007.

He then trained in research and fieldwork, notably with Alexis Gorgues at the Malvieu site (Saint-Pons-de-Thomières, Hérault). It was with him that he began writing his Master's thesis on the markers of production and exchange practices deposited in funerary contexts during the Iron Age. The project already had a European dimension, as he was working on French and Spanish territories. His work at university led him to study balance weights found in tombs from the Iberian period on the Valencian coast. He then noticed the heterogeneity of data on the subject on a European scale: the subject of his thesis was then found! He wrote his first research project in 2013, then enrolled for an unfunded PhD at Toulouse Jean-Jaurès University in 2014, under the co-direction of Pierre-Yves Milcent and Alexis Gorgues. In 2015, he won a one-month grant from the Casa de Velázquez (Madrid), which enabled him to travel around Spain studying weighing instruments held in various museums and collections. The following year, he joined the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Hispaniques et Ibériques (EHEHI) at Casa de Velázquez as a member for two years. He will finally defend his thesis in September 2019, and publish it in spring 2022 in the Dan@ digital collection of Editions Ausonius.

The subject of her thesis is: Weighing instruments in Western Europe in the Age of Metals (14th-3rd century BC). Design, uses and users.  The prize jury was impressed by this original thesis, as much for its subject as for the analysis protocol used. It offers a new vision of trade and the economy of protohistoric societies, by developing a subtle archaeological and anthropological approach to understanding the long history of ways of measuring value in societies without writing or institutionalised monetary systems.

Marilou Nordez successfully defended her doctoral thesis in 2017 at the University of Toulouse Jean-Jaurès on L'âge du Bronze moyen atlantique au prisme de la parure : Recherches sur les ornements corporels de France et des régions voisines (XVe-XIVe s. av. notre ère), a thesis which has already been the subject of a monographic publication. She is currently a post-doctoral researcher on the Celtic Gold research programme, co-funded by the French and German national research agencies, which enables her to broaden her field of expertise to include the Iron Age.

Marilou Nordez has developed an integrated method for studying jewellery. She relies on a classic 'typo-chronological' approach, which she supplements in an original way with archaeometric analyses, to specify the composition of the metal, and technological analyses, to reconstruct the production chains. These data enable her to question the concept of the 'Atlantic Middle Bronze Age', to reconstruct previously unidentified technical processes at such an early period, and to clarify the transfer of raw materials, objects and techniques across north-western Europe. The prize money will enable him to extend the chronological scope of his investigation into the finery of Europe's Atlantic seaboard to the whole of Protohistory (2nd and 1st millennia BC).

Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof, a Dutch-American scholar, obtained her doctorate at the Faculty of Archaeology of the University of Leiden, with a dissertation on the burials of the Early Iron Age elite of the Netherlands.

In addition to devoting her master's thesis and later her doctorate to the burials of the Early Iron Age elite in the Netherlands, Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof also initiated, co-organised and published an international seminar during her doctoral thesis on large-scale connections and interactions in the Early Iron Age. Both this seminar and his doctoral thesis demonstrated the value of a European perspective on these tombs in order to understand the large-scale contacts that existed among the elite during this period, which was crucial for the construction of European societies.

This period saw an unprecedented emergence of elites, who were buried with weapons, crockery and bronze chariots with cosmological significance - Joseph Déchelette was one of the first to describe and catalogue such objects in his Manuel d'Archéologie. These 'princely tombs' are mainly found in the so-called 'Hallstattian' culture of Central Europe (named after a site in the Austrian Alps), but burials with the same objects are also found in peripheral regions, with a particular concentration in the Netherlands, indicating direct contacts over hundreds of kilometres. After studying in detail the burials of elites in the territory of the present-day Netherlands and Belgium, Sasja van der Vaart-Verschoof continues her research on this period by examining how these graves relate to those found in France, Germany and Austria, as well as to others further afield.