Thomas Faucher is a researcher at the French National Research Center (CNRS) and Director since January 2023 of the Centre d’Etudes Alexandrines in Egypt.
He obtained a Masters degree at the University of Poitiers on the Early Ptolemaic coins of Syria and Phoenicia and a PhD at the University of Sorbonne-Paris IV, in Paris, on the minting of Ptolemaic coins, under the direction of Olivier Picard.
He is an archaeologist and a numismatist. Before joining the CNRS in 2013, he has been scientific member of the French school for Oriental studies in Cairo (Ifao) from 2011 to 2013 and before that, he has collaborated as a post doctoral researcher for the project Nomisma, which focused on the circulation of coinage on the Mediterranean Sea in Classical and Hellenistic periods. He was the Visiting Scholar for the Graduate Summer Seminar in Numismatics of the American Numismatic Society (New York) in 2017; in 2018 he was elected to the Kraay Visitorship at the Wolfson College and to the Robinson Visiting Scholarship in the Heberden Coin Room of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
He first worked on the coinage of Alexandria with Olivier Picard, on the large dataset unearthed by the French team in the ancient capital. Its research quickly pointed towards to the mechanisms of coin production. He then took over the study of the coins of more than a dozen of archaeological sites over Egypt. He directed two field schools on coin conservation: the first one in Karnak (Luxor) in 2016 and a second at the Cairo Egyptian Museum of antiquities in 2018.
His research also reached the fields of archaeometallurgy and archaeometry. He led a long lasting project on the recreation of ancient coins. During three summer sessions, his team struck more than 20.000 coins following the ancient conditions of striking coins and produced a set of data on coin making techniques. His interest in coin analysis took in consideration the research of primary sources of metals, particularly of gold. He was Director of the French archaeological mission of the Egyptian Eastern desert (MAFDO) from 2018 to 2022, where he is still studying the extraction and production of gold.
He has written and edited more than 80 books and articles on the field of archaeology and numismatics and produced several documentary movies about excavations and experimental archaeology. He has received several awards for his PhD and publications. He also gave over 40 seminars and conferences in about 20 countries worldwide. Recently he has been training personnel, both in universities and in the Ministry of Antiquities in Egypt.