An Archaeology of Political Life, from the Bronze Age to the Kurdish Spring

Relationships between states and state-less societies have been a feature of human history for five thousand years. But our understanding of those relationships has often been distorted by inappropriate comparisons between ancient and modern situations, and by the legacy of outdated evolutionary concepts. My lecture will advance an alternative view of human political development, rooted in the evidence of the archaeological record, and will explore its implications for contemporary state-making projects in the Middle East.

Biography: David Wengrow joined UCL in 2004 having been Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford and Frankfort Fellow at the Warburg Institute. His books include The Archaeology of Early Egypt and What Makes Civilisation? He recently gave the Rostovtzeff Lectures at New York University, and is shortly to give the Haecker Lectures at Heidelberg. His current fieldwork is in Iraqi Kurdistan, investigating the prehistoric transition from village to urban life.