The 2009 Rhind Lectures, entitled “New Light on the Dawn: a new perspective on the Neolithic Revolution in Southwest Asia” and presented by Emeritus Professor Trevor Watkins, Honorary Professorial Fellow of the School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, were the first to be recorded by the Society.

Rhind Lecture 2: “From hunting and harvesting to cultivation, herding and domestication” by Professor Trevor Watkins

There have been significant advances in recent years in our understanding of the changes in strategies for subsistence among the hunter-gatherers of the Upper Palaeolithic and Epi-palaeolithic periods. But one of the most important contributions has been that of Kent Flannery, who in the 1960s coined the phrase ‘broad spectrum revolution’ for the strategy of increasing the range of species on which a hunter-gatherer group depended. As groups concentrated more effort on trapping birds, fish and hunting small mammals, they also harvested, stored and processed the nutritious seeds of wild cereals, grasses and legumes, such as lentils, chickpeas, vetches and beans. The change of strategy was revolutionary in that, according to Flannery, it encouraged a more sedentary, less mobile, way of life that led to the establishment of permanent village communities and the significant growth of population. Sooner or later, demographic growth then led to people seeking new territories to exploit, and the packing of the landscape. That in turn made necessary the artificial intensification of production that we know as farming, and which produced domesticated crops; and farming was soon followed by the herding of goat, sheep, cattle and pigs, that is, the domestication of animals. Flannery’s ‘broad spectrum revolution’ made farming a consequence of the revolution, and not its cause.