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SUMMARY:The After Life - Professor Clive Gamble\, University of Southampto
 n
DTSTART:20120309T173000Z
DTEND:20120309T183000Z
UID:TALK30614@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nImagination makes us human and immortal. It allows
  us to roam into deep-time and to navigate the future. Everything is possi
 ble in places that can be experienced but never visited\, and in this resp
 ect the after-life is just one imagined geography among many. All these ge
 ographies share the property of ‘going beyond’ where the life of the i
 ndividual is extended across space and time. The lives of humans and thing
 s – as represented in this lecture series by ruins and sparks\, the soci
 al and artificial – all illustrate this property of extending beyond the
  limits of the body which produces a knowledge of ourselves that is relati
 onal rather than rational. For example\, the human community is different 
 from all other social animals because it embodies a release from such phys
 ical proximity. Here the individual is no longer bound by what goes on in 
 their presence but by what might be enacted elsewhere. It is therefore the
  social framework of interaction and extension that is fundamental to unde
 rstanding the evolution of the human imagination of which the after-life a
 nd all other types of life is a product. Such a view has a long history. D
 urkheim argued exactly a hundred years ago that religion is not a separate
  sphere of life but instead is embedded in the social. However\, he had no
  deep-time archaeological evidence to guide him in the historical analysis
  of the phenomenon. \nIn this lecture I will examine the evidence that we 
 now have for the evolution of human imagination before the appearance of t
 emples and shrines and the institutionalisation of the after-life. I will 
 start by examining the imaginative geography that created a deep-time past
  for humans. I will use those insights from the acceptance of artefacts as
  proxies for great human antiquity in the nineteenth century to consider t
 he wider evolutionary significance\, and its timing\, of being able to thi
 nk outside the box.\n\nBiography\n\nClive Gamble began his teaching career
  at the University of Southampton in 1975 and in 2001 he founded and direc
 ted the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins (CAHO). In 2004 he mov
 ed to the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway University of London a
 s a Research Professor in the Centre for Quaternary Research. He returned 
 to Southampton in 2011. He has undertaken research into the evolution of h
 uman society concentrating in particular on the Palaeolithic. Among the ma
 jor projects he has directed are the British Academy Centenary Project (20
 03-10) From Lucy to language: the archaeology of the social brain and the 
 NERC funded programme Environmental Factors and Chronology in Human Evolut
 ion and Dispersal (EFCHED) that was completed in 2006. Currently he is a m
 ember of NERC’s RESET consortium (2008-2013) that investigates human ada
 ptations to abrupt environmental transitions during the Pleistocene. His r
 ecent books include Origins and Revolutions: human identity in earliest pr
 ehistory (CUP 2007)\; The hominid individual in context (Routledge 2005 ed
 ited with Martin Porr)\; the best selling textbook Archaeology: the basics
  (Routledge 2008) and the international award winning The Palaeolithic soc
 ieties of Europe (CUP 1999). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academ
 y in 2000 and has been a Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries of L
 ondon. He became a Trustee of the British Museum in 2010 and President of 
 the Royal Anthropological Institute in 2011.\n\n
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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