LESC, CNRS

Trevor Watkins, professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, will speak on Wednesday, 5 November 2025 as part of the interdisciplinary seminar L’Échangeur, organised by LESC and UMR 8068 TEMPS. This seminar is intended to be a space for exchange and dialogue with foreign researchers visiting the Île-de-France region. It will allow colleagues – anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, prehistorians and others – to come and discuss their latest research with members of our respective laboratories. It will also open up a space in which we can exchange ideas with foreign researchers invited as part of various international programmes in which we participate.

If we are to advance our understanding of prehistory, we need to fit our archaeological knowledge into an understanding of the (cultural) evolutionary process. That was what I was attempting with my recent book, Becoming Neolithic, whose synthesis was framed in the context of cultural niche construction theory. Writing prehistory is very different from the writing of history. As 2025 is the centenary of Gordon Childe’s first major publication, and of the Abercromby Chair of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, to which he was appointed, it is appropriate to start by discussing how he reframed the writing of prehistory, and how popular and influential were his books and ideas (in particular, the Neolithic and urban revolutions. In the 1960s American archaeologist-anthropologists Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery and their colleagues (under the banner of “processualist” archaeology) attempted to update the writing of prehistory within the contemporary framework of evolution and eco-systems theory. Since then, evolutionary theory has been further transformed (the extended evolutionary synthesis) including the development of new fields, like (cultural) niche construction theory. At the same time systems theory has grown with new theoretical work on complexity and complex adaptive systems theory. These theoretical advances are challenging archaeologists, both researchers, and teachers, and students.