College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor Dr Johannes Müller

The first contributor to the 2014-2015 Munro Lectures is Professor Dr Johannes Müller.

Monuments and Ideologies in the Neolithic Landscapes

Event details

Date: Thursday 12 February 2015, 5.30pm - 6.30pm

Venue: Meadows Lecture Theatre, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Doorway 4, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG

Biography

Professor Johannes Mueller

Johannes Müller is Professor and Director at the Institute of Pre-and Protohistoric Archaeology of Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel. He has pioneered the field of social space in prehistoric landscapes and co-directed major excavation and fieldwork projects in Central and Southeast Europe.

Currently he is leading a major cooperative research project about megaliths and societies in Central Europe and a research project on Neolithic mega-sites. Human development in landscapes is a major interdisciplinary research and education program, of which he is the speaker.

Lecture abstract

In northern central Europe and southern Scandinavia thousands of megalithic monuments were constructed circa 3600-3200BC.

Which societies erected them, and why? Were different ideologies responsible for different patterns of social space, reflected in monumental constructions?

Beside different types of megalithic burial sites, causewayed enclosures were very important for the earliest agriculturalists of northern Europe. They were placed in a landscape that went through dramatic environmental changes.

Within European society collective and cooperative behavior changed through time into a pronunciation of individual differences. Different architecture was used for the display of different social roles, and in this sense megalithic constructions are a reflection of the need to express stability in the relation between individuals and society, humans and nature.

As a consequence, the Neolithic mobility of ideas led to the formation of reorganized space, a reorganized space that—as a social space—utilized the position of the ancestors for the positioning of the living.