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.

2009 Rhind Lecture 3: “Settling down, staying together: from Epi-palaeolithic to Neolithic”

Most accounts of the period in southwest Asia concentrate almost exclusively on the Neolithic; the final phase of the Epi-palaeolithic is used as a prologue to the real story, which is the beginning of farming and the domestication of plants and animals. But we now know that the Epi-palaeolithic period in southwest Asia was ten thousand years long, and some of the features that are often thought to characterise the Neolithic were already present from the beginning of the Epi-palaeolithic, or even earlier. The changes in subsistence strategies discussed in the previous lecture were inextricably linked with changes in settlement patterns, namely a trend towards sedentary, permanently co-resident communities on an unprecedented scale, with populations numbering hundreds and even thousands. And we must also take into account the significant changes in social organization implied by these new economic practices. We can explore the trend towards sedentism through the Epi-palaeolithic and into the Neolithic, the growth in the scale of communities, and the changes in domestic architecture. Alongside the fundamental changes in settlement and society, there was also a remarkable growth in exchange networks that linked together communities as far apart as central or eastern Turkey and southern Jordan or southwest Iran.