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 4: “Architecture, monuments and “theatres of memory”” by Prof Trevor Watkins

Recorded in the Royal Society of Edinburgh auditorium at 3.30pm on 4th April 2009 using Camtasia software from Techsmith

From about 12,000 BC onwards, there begin to appear extraordinary cultural phenomena that must have had significant meaning for the communities of their times. There are remarkable developments in domestic architecture, in settlement design (the beginnings of town planning?), in the architecture of buildings of special, community purpose, and in sculptures, figurines and symbolic objects. Many communities of the early Neolithic period buried the bodies of the dead within the settlement of the living, and sometimes under the living floors of their houses. Some of those bodies have had their skulls removed from the burial, and some of the corresponding skulls have been found cached within houses or in other special places. What was the role of all these theatrical rituals and forms of display? Were they the means that enabled people to create and sustain permanent communities numbering hundreds or thousands over centuries – something that the hunter-gatherers of the whole of human prehistory had never done before?