UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture 2025
This year's UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture, to be given by Professor Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University, Sweden), will take place on 14 May 2025.
UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture 2025
14 May 2025, 18:00 – 19:30
Piecing Together Past Human Encounters with Death: a theory and practice of the archaeology of death
Abstract
How can archaeologists understand the human experience of death in the deep past? More specifically, how can the archaeological record, consisting of fragmented material traces of past people’s actions when faced with death, provide real insights into past lives. The lecture will embrace themes of belief, ritual, cosmology, the dead, emotion, and concepts of body and self.
Drawing on the legacy of Gordon Childe’s contributions to archaeological thought, and with inspiration from his book Piecing Together the Past, this lecture explores a classic archaeological challenge: how can we archaeologically approach human experience beyond the material? Through the example of hunter-gatherer-fisher burials from prehistoric Europe, this lecture explores the potential of asking fundamental but critical questions to build an interpretative framework that allows us to approach these issues. Through a focus on the physical handling of the dead human body – including cremation, inhumation, manipulation, and even mumification – the approach opens a window into past lived experience where death is understood within its context, and in turn provides insights into the hunter-gatherer-fisher world more broadly.
The ‘Welcome’ will be given by Kevin MacDonald (Professor of African Archaeology and Director, UCL Institute of Archaeology) and ‘Vote of Thanks’ by Andrew Reynolds (Professor of Medieval Archaeology, UCL Institute of Archaeology).
This in-person event is ticketed, with pre-booking essential, via the link above.
The Lecture will be followed by a reception in the A.G. Leventis Gallery.
Gordon Childe Advanced Seminar 2025
Professor Liv Nilsson Stutz is a bioarchaeologist and archaeologist (PhD, Lund University 2004). She has worked as a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology at Emory University (USA) and is currently a Professor in Archaeology at LNU. Her research interests are broad and interdisciplinary including Death, Rituals and the Handling of the dead body, Research on Research Ethics with regards to human remains, Politics, Repatriation and Claims to Culture as well as Material Culture, Memory and Affect.
Further information
Ticketing
Ticketed and Pre-booking essential
Cost
Free
Open to
All
Availability
Sold out