CAHO Christmas Lecture

 

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Dear all,

We are pleased to announce that the annual CAHO Christmas Lecture will be given by dr Penny Spikins from the University of York. In the spirit of  the festive season she will talk about: Angels or Demons?: 

Can the archaeological record tell us what motivated our earliest ancestors? For more details please see the abstract below.

The lecture will take place on 12 December (Thursday) 2014 at 4pm in the Wymer Lab, bld 65a, Avenue Campus. Wine and mince pies will be served.

Hope to see many of you!

 

Angels or Demons?: Can the archaeological record tell us what motivated our earliest ancestors?
From when science took over the story of what made us human we have been driven to understand the motivations of our ancestors. Were they angels or demons? The archaeological evidence appears to support either case depending how we view it. Perhaps it is not a question that we can answer, nonetheless we can address how emotional capacitiesevolved by considering archaeological evidence. Here I discuss two case studies – the evolution of emotional self-control and that of compassion and raise the question of why social emotions have been seen as difficult or even dangerous to research.

Written by

I am a postgraduate research student at the Institute for Complex Systems Simulation and the Centre for the Archaeology of Human Origins. I received my undergraduate and Master degrees in Prehistoric and Medieval Archaeology from the Jagiellonian University (Poland) in 2008. In 2012 I obtained a Master in Philosophy in ‘Archaeology of Human Origins’ from the University of Southampton. I am currently enrolled at the Doctoral Training Centre in Complex Systems Simulation where I have completed the first taught year, an equivalent to a Master in Computer Science, and I continue my studies as a PhD student. My research is focused on the applications of computational modelling to archaeology and Palaeolithic archaeology in particular. I use a variety of simulation techniques to explore archaeological questions, test hypotheses and formalise conceptual models.

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