Professor Detlef Gronenborn

Event details

Lecture title: The Neolithisation of Western Temperate Eurasia

Date: 14 February 2008, 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 175, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh

Biography

Detlef Gronenborn received his academic training at the Universities of Cologne and Frankfurt. He wrote his dissertation on the transition from the Late Mesolithic to the Early Neolithic in Central Europe and afterwards turned to the Iron Age and Historical Periods in the Nigerian Chad Basin where he studied the emergence and southward expansion of an Islamic empire and its interaction with indigenous, non-Islamic chiefdoms.

Gronenborn is currently undertaking research on the earlier Neolithic in southwestern Germany but also on a late Iron Age high-status burial ground in northern Nigeria - he is research curator with the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum in Mainz and Adjunct Professor with the Mainz University.

Lecture abstract

Doubtlessly the transition to farming constitutes a major step for humanity - it may indeed be seen as a socio-political and economic quantum leap. While different forms of agriculture did evolve in various regions of the world, the classic centre for Western Eurasia remains the “fertile crescent”.

Agriculture and animal husbandry emerged in this broad Near Eastern region during and after the final centuries of the last glacial and then spread to Europe but also to Central and South Asia. This spread has been a major research focus for many decades and continues to be investigated with new aspects and results coming from archaeogenetics, paleoclimatology and mathematical modelling.

The lecture will introduce these new approaches on a broader scale and then focus on the presenters original study region, West-Central Europe.