Professor Clive Bonsall

Inaugural lecture of Professor Clive Bonsall, 3 May 2011.

Event details

Lecture title: "Farmers, Floods and River Gods: What happened at the Iron Gates of the Danube between 6300 and 6000 BC?"

Date: 3 May 2011, 5.15pm

Venue: Lecture Theatre 183, Old College

Lecture abstract

In the 1960s, Romanian and Serbian archaeologists established an impressive sequence of Mesolithic sites in the Iron Gates section of the Danube Valley dating from 12,000 to 6000 BC.

From this work emerged a compelling picture of a society that was initially reliant on nomadic hunting, but over millennia became sedentary and more socially and technologically sophisticated.

The findings suggested that the Mesolithic inhabitants had developed an advanced culture based on riverine resources, which survived long after agriculture was established in the surrounding areas.

A new phase of research began in the 1990s, in which the University of Edinburgh plays a leading role. Excavations at Schela Cladovei in Romania, one of the few sites to escape flooding when dams were constructed across the Danube, together with scientific analyses of finds from the 1960s are generating new data that challenge previous perceptions and serve as a basis for more robust interpretations.

In this talk, I will review the advances in our knowledge of the Mesolithic settlement of the Iron Gates region. These have provided a clearer insight into what appears to have been a stable cultural tradition lasting more than five millennia, followed by a period of rapid cultural change between 6300 and 6000 BC, the causes of which are still hotly debated.

Lecture video