Events

In the Americas, the deep Indigenous past prior to 12,000 years before the present has been aggressively denied by American anthropologists for over a century. Anthropologists’ denial of the deep Indigenous past of the Americas, has cleaved Indigenous people’s links to their homeland and created them as recent immigrants to the Americas, on a global scale of human history.

Star Carr has dominated our understanding of the British Mesolithic. Since its excavation by Grahame Clark between 1949 and 1951 it has been subject to extensive debate and reinterpretation. These led to new questions for the site that could only be addressed through excavation.

The South Asian Palaeolithic record has a long history of research, with a rich body of information on site contexts and palaeoenvironments, yet marked by sparser information on chronological controls, technological variability and inferences on past behaviour.  We discuss recent debates in Palaeolithic studies in India focusing on nomenclatures and issues related to population migrations, technological convergence and debates on cultural evolutionary trajectories.

The Mesolithic has often been treated as a period without history, where the only significant change is from an early Mesolithic characterised by highly mobile big game hunters to more sedentary marine-focused late Mesolithic. This presentation presents the results of a new British Academy funded project which has aimed, by contrast. to understand temporal change over this period on a centennial scale and produce an historical narrative of the Mesolithic inhabitation of Britain.

The earliest evidence for horse husbandry comes from the Eneolithic period in Central Asia some 5,500 years ago, yet the widespread use horses for equestrianism across Eurasia spreads rapidly only after 4,000 BP, in the middle Bronze Age. This talk outlines the evidence for the archaeological and palaeogenomic sequence in Central Asia and the Pontic-Caspian steppe leading up to this horizon.

The lecture will present the results of excavations carried out at Principal Place between 2011 and 2016. The site lies in the upper valley of the Walbrook stream and within an area of the northern extramural cemetery of Roman London.