The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research hosts a keynote Annual Lecture delivered by eminent, international scholars on a wide range of archaeological research which crosses continents, periods and approaches in its exploration of the diversity of the human past.
The Thirty-eight McDonald Annual Lecture
Will be in November 2026
All details to follow
* Please be aware that a photographer and filming team from or commissioned by the University of Cambridge will be taking photographs and a film of the Annual Lecture. The photographs and films may be published, transmitted or broadcast in official University publications and in University publicity materials included in University and others’ websites and social media.
Recent McDonald Annual Lecture speakers:
- 2025: Professor Zoë Crossland (Columbia University) - After Landscape
- 2024: Professor Alfredo González-Ruibal (Incipit-CSIC) - Modernity and the end of globalization
- 2023: Professor David Wengrow (University College London) - What might an archaeology of freedom look like?
- 2022: Professor Amy Bogaard (University of Oxford) - Prehistoric farming futures? Recent insights from western Asia and Europe
- 2021: Professor Alison Wylie (University of British Columbia) - Bearing Witness: Collaborative Archaeology in a Settler Colonial Context
- 2020: Professor Robert Foley (University of Cambridge) - The fourth handshake: selection, diversity and ecology in human evolutionary studies
- 2019: Professor Shadreck Chirikure (University of Cape Town, University of Oxford) - The Political Economy of Precolonial African States - Metals, Trinkets, Land, etc, etc
- 2018: Professor Roberta Gilchrist (University of Reading) - The Medieval Ritual Landscape: Archaeology and Folk Religion
- 2017: Jean-Jacques Hublin, (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig) - Modern Human Origins: In Search of a Garden of Eden
- 2016: Eske Willerslev, (University of Cambridge and University of Copenhagen) - Human migration and mega faunal extinctions
- 2015: Norman Yoffee (University of Michigan, Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University) - Counternarratives of Early States in Mesopotamia (and Elsewhere)
- 2014: Graeme Barker, (University of Cambridge) - The archaeology of climate/people interactions: science or story telling?
- 2013: Christine Hastorf (University of Berkeley) - Houses, food and distributed people in the later Prehistory of the Central Andes (AD1000-1500)
