Colin Renfrew

University of Cambridge | Cam · McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

This article aims to summarise the results of three periods of fieldwork carried out since 2006. These are the Cambridge Keros Project of 2006–2008, the Keros Island Survey of 2012–2013, and the Keros-Naxos Seaways Project of 2015–2018. Taken together, these form a coherent, large-scale project that aimed to study a maritime landscape in some depth...

Cycladic architecture has been the focus of archaeological, ethnographic and architectural studies, which have produced significant knowledge about the islands’ built environment. Despite the number of published studies, there is little archaeological evidence related to the parts of buildings, such as roofs and second storeys made of degradable ma...

Keros, in the heart of the Cyclades, was the seafaring center of a regional network in the Early Bronze Age. It drew in participants from far and wide in rituals of deposition at its “Special Deposits” and boasted the largest planned and monumental architecture of the period, where early metallurgy was practiced.

This article presents a holistic and reflexive process for archaeological fieldwork from inception to publication. The opportunities afforded by maturing digital techniques allowed fundamental rethinking of field and laboratory practice paradigms. A number of normally unquestioned aspects of archaeological praxis were examined with the goal of reor...

Keros, in the heart of the Cyclades, was the seafaring center of a regional network in the Early Bronze Age. It drew in participants from far and wide in rituals of deposition at its “Special Deposits,” and boasted the largest planned and monumental architecture of the period, where early metallurgy was practiced.

Significance This is a phylogenetic network of SARS-CoV-2 genomes sampled from across the world. These genomes are closely related and under evolutionary selection in their human hosts, sometimes with parallel evolution events, that is, the same virus mutation emerges in two different human hosts. This makes character-based phylogenetic networks th...

For more than a half-century, obsidian provenancing has underpinned many archaeological investigations of peoples of the past. The pace of obsidian studies in this regard has gathered significantly since around 2007, and we review the literature to gain a sense of where this momentum has come from, and what it heralds. In part, there is a data revo...

First investigated archaeologically in 1963, it is only with the recent publication of the 2006–2008 excavations that the nature of the Early Bronze Age sanctuary and settlement on Keros is becoming clear. Further investigations – a survey in 2012–2013 and excavations in 2016–2018 – have expanded our knowledge of the sanctuary. This paper sets out...

Recent research at Liangzhu in China documents the settlement as a fortified town dating from 3300-2300 BC, accompanied by an impressive system of earthen dams for flood control and irrigation. An earthen platform in the centre of the town probably supported a palace complex, and grave goods from the adjacent Fanshan cemetery include finely worked...

The origins of religion and ritual in humans have been the focus of centuries of thought in archaeology, anthropology, theology, evolutionary psychology and more. Play and ritual have many aspects in common, and ritual is a key component of the early cult practices that underlie the religious systems of societies in all parts of the world. This boo...

Aboriginal Australians represent one of the oldest continuous cultures outside Africa, with evidence indicating that their ancestors arrived in the ancient landmass of Sahul (present-day New Guinea and Australia) ~55 thousand years ago. Genetic studies, though limited, have demonstrated both the uniqueness and antiquity of Aboriginal Australian gen...

Archaeological, palaeontological and geological evidence shows that post-glacial warming released human populations from their various climate-bound refugia. Yet specific connections between these refugia and the timing and routes of post-glacial migrations that ultimately established modern patterns of genetic variation remain elusive. Here, we us...

Aboriginal Australians are one of the more poorly studied populations from the standpoint of human evolution and genetic diversity. Thus, to investigate their genetic diversity, the possible date of their ancestors’ arrival and their relationships with neighboring populations, we analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diversity in a large sample of Abo...

The British Museum marked the 250th anniversary of its foundation this year, with an exhibition, The Museum of the Mind: art and memory in world cultures. We asked four archaeologists to review the show: Barry Cunliffe, professor at Oxford University and a trustee of the Museum; Colin Renfrew, professor at Cambridge University and former trustee; C...

ANTIQUITY and the scope of archaeology - Volume 76 Issue 294 - Colin Renfrew

In a single year two of the fundamental principles for the study of antiquity were established: chronology and process. Both have been elaborated and re-visited since: chronology most significantly 90 years later in 1949 with the development of radiocarbon dating by Willard Libby. That these two foundations should be established in the ambit of a s...

Obsidian was not necessarily the earliest object of trade, but it certainly seems to be the first for which material evidence remains. It has been reported from nearly every Early Neolithic settlement in the Near East, although many of these sites are distant from the natural sources. In our first paper (Cann and Renfrew 1964), we outlined a method...

In the history of west Mediterranean contacts and communications, obsidian has a special place, being the first traded commodity documented in the archaeological record. The commercial contacts which it reveals precede those of the Mycenaeans by more than three millennia. The general outlines of this trade and the principal sources exploited have p...

Evidence of contact between cultural groups is of great importance to the study of prehistory. Although the development of absolute dating methods has decreased our dependence on the discovery of such contacts for chronology, they are essential material when the origin and spread of culture is being studied. In the past, cultural contacts have gene...

Ian Alden Russell | Andrew Cochrane: You’ve written some of the earliest works that explore the relationships between art, art history and archaeology. In this book, there are a number of younger practitioners adopting creative practices in their archaeological work. We want to try to find ways to frame the type of work they’re trying to do. We thi...

A survey of the language prehistory of Western and Central Asia, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.

A survey of the language prehistory of the Pacific region, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.

A survey of the language prehistory of the Americas, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.

A survey of the language prehistory of South and Island South-East Asia, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.

An introduction to the principles, methods and models used in uncovering language prehistory. All are assessed in particular with a view to establishing how this linguistic perspective can best be converged with those of archaeology and genetics, towards a more coherent and holistic cross-disciplinary vision of the human past.

A survey of the language prehistory of Europe and the Mediterranean, within a cross-disciplinary perspective.

Tracking prehistoric migrations - Volume 88 Issue 340 - Colin Renfrew, Peter Forster

The very early development and extent of the obsidian trade in the Near East is being increasingly documented by the discovery and excavation of Early Neolithic sites throughout the area. Since the publication of our last paper (Renfrew, Cann and Dixon, 1966), obsidians from five aceramic Neolithic sites have been analysed, and the natural source o...

Ten years have now elapsed since the death of V. Gordon Childe, whose great achievement it was to relate the many disparate elements of European prehistory into a single coherent whole. These ten years have seen not only the sustained application of radiocarbon dating to the south-east European Neolithic (Quitta, 1967; Kohl and Quitta, 1966), but t...

The discovery of the early bronze age sanctuary on the Cycladic island of Keros is briefly described. Why islanders in the Aegean should establish the world’s first maritime sanctuary around 2500 BC is then considered, and other instances of early centres of congregation are briefly discussed. Specific features of the Special Deposit South at Kavos...

The Settlement at Dhaskalio is the first volume in the series The Sanctuary on Keros: Excavations at Dhaskalio and Dhaskalio Kavos, 2006-2008, edited by Colin Renfrew, Olga Philaniotou, Neil Brodie, Giorgos Gavalas and Michael Boyd. Here the findings are presented from the well-stratified settlement of Dhaskalio, today an islet near the Cycladic is...

Haplogroup H dominates present-day Western European mitochondrial DNA variability (>40%), yet was less common (~19%) among Early Neolithic farmers (~5450 BC) and virtually absent in Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Here we investigate this major component of the maternal population history of modern Europeans and sequence 39 complete haplogroup H mitoc...

This chapter discusses the role of general models for language change and considers four such classes of model. The farming/language dispersal model is a frequent case for language replacement. But problems of chronology frequently obscure the relationships between archaeological and linguistic data.

Previous studies that pooled Indian populations from a wide variety of geographical locations, have obtained contradictory conclusions about the processes of the establishment of the Varna caste system and its genetic impact on the origins and demographic histories of Indian populations. To further investigate these questions we took advantage that...

Modal tree obtained by BATWING indicating the coalescence time divergence estimates (in years) among Major Populations Groups (MPG) using 17 STRs from haplogroup (a) F-M89, (b) H1-M52, (c) L1-M26/M72. (TIFF)

List of Y chromosome SNPS and haplotype data for the 1680 individuals from 31 tribal and non-tribal populations presented in this study. (XLS)

Modal tree obtained by BATWING indicating the coalescence time divergence estimates (in years) among endogamous populations within (a) HTF and HTK groups, (b) DLF, (c) BRH and HTC, using 17 STRs from all haplogroups. (TIFF)

AMOVA analysis of various population groupings based on the 17STR haplotype & 95%CI based on re-sampling of the samples across populations. (XLS)

PCA plot showing the first two principal components of haplogroup frequencies for 97 non-tribal (circles) and tribal (squares) populations of India and nearby regions from previous publications, compared to the non-tribal (horizontal ovals) and tribal (diamonds) populations from the present study. Symbols have been colored according to linguistic c...

Reduced median network of 17 microsatellite haplotypes within haplogroup. (a) HG C-M130 using 74 chromosomes, (b) HG H1-M52 using 292 chromosomes (c) HG H- M69 using 79 chromosomes, (d) HG L1 – M27/M76 using 235 chromosomes, (e) HG R1a1-M17 using 214 chromosomes. Circles are colored based on the 7 Major Population Groups as shown in Figure 1, and t...

List of population codes and their publication references used in Figure S1. (XLS)

Fishers exact test p -values for the NRY HG frequencies among the 7 Major Populations Groups and among the 31 sampled populations. (XLS)

In their recent article, Warmuth et al. (1) have misrepresented our 2002 publication (Jansen et al.) (2) on horse origins. We had in fact proposed the same scenario as they do now: an original restricted area of horse domestication, and, as domesticated horses spread, subsequent recruitment of local mares from further wild horse populations into th...

This article argues that the Cyclades have played a central role in the prehistory of the Aegean. Even in the late Upper Palaeolithic period, before there is evidence of permanent settlement in the islands, the volcanic glass known as obsidian-and very suitable as a raw material for chipped stone tools -was being brought from its principal Aegean s...

For decades, the peopling of the Americas has been explored through the analysis of uniparentally inherited genetic systems in Native American populations and the comparison of these genetic data with current linguistic groupings. In northern North America, two language families predominate: Eskimo-Aleut and Na-Dene. Although the genetic evidence f...

The sanctuary on the island of Keros takes the form of deposits of broken marble vessels and figurines, probably brought severally for deposition from elsewhere in the Cyclades. These acts of devotion have now been accurately dated, thanks to Bayesian analyses of the contemporary stratigraphic sequence on the neighbouring islet of Dhaskalio. The pe...

This article discusses the archaeology of religion in the prehistoric Aegean. For the Neolithic, the evidence of the figurines is widespread, but the extent to which their significance is 'religious' is open to debate. For the Early Bronze Age, funerary rituals are richly documented in Early Minoan Crete, and the iconography of the folded-arm figur...

A global picture is emerging of sex-specific transmission of language change in quite different regions and continents.

Y-chromosome Haplogroup O is the dominant lineage of East Asians, comprising more than a quarter of all males on the world; however, its internal phylogeny remains insufficiently investigated. In this study, we determined the phylogenetic position of recently defined markers (L127, KL1, KL2, P164, and PK4) in the background of Haplogroup O. In the...

Celtic from the West: Alternative Perspectives from Archaeology, Genetics, Language and Literature, edited by CunliffeBarry & KochJohn T., 2010. Oxford: Oxbow Books; ISBN 978-1-84217-410-4 hardback £40 & US$80; viii +384 pp., 127 figs. - Volume 21 Issue 2 - Colin Renfrew

We analyzed 40 single nucleotide polymorphism and 19 short tandem repeat Y-chromosomal markers in a large sample of 1,525 indigenous individuals from 14 populations in the Caucasus and 254 additional individuals representing potential source populations. We also employed a lexicostatistical approach to reconstruct the history of the languages of th...

The Stone Age and the Early Bronze Age in Cyprus. By DikaiosPorphyrios and StewartJames R.. The Swedish Cyprus Expedition, Vol. IV, Part I a. 12 × 8½. Pp. xlv+401+156 pls.+ 105 figs. Lund, 1962. No price given. - Volume 46 Issue 1 - Colin Renfrew

To Illustrate the Monuments: Essays on Archaeology Presented to Stuart Piggott. Edited by MegawJ. V. S.. 25 × 19 cm. Pp. 332 incl. numerous pls. and figs. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976. £15·00. - Volume 58 Issue 1 - Colin Renfrew

Cultural expansions, including of religions, frequently leave genetic traces of differentiation and in-migration. These expansions may be driven by complex doctrinal differentiation, together with major population migrations and gene flow. The aim of this study was to explore the genetic signature of the establishment of religious communities in a...

The construction of formal measurement systems underlies the development of science, technology, economy and new ways of understanding and explaining the world. Human societies have developed such systems in different ways, in different places and at different times, and recent archaeological investigations highlight the importance of these activit...

The construction of formal measurement systems underlies the development of science and technology, economy, and new ways of understanding and explaining the world. Human societies have developed such systems in different ways in different places and at different times, and recent archaeological investigations highlight the importance of these acti...

Kykladika in Early Minoan Crete have long been recognised, and the possibility of Early Cycladic immigrants in north Crete seriously considered. But so far there is but a single convincingly Minoan import to a secure and stratified context in the Early Bronze Age Cyclades, first recognised as such by Peter Warren (from a cemetery on Ano Kouphonisi)...

Cognitive archaeology is the archaeology of mind - the study of past ways of thought as inferred from the material remains. It recognizes that "mind" goes beyond the brain and involves the full range of things that skilful humans do; tool making, planning, and the construction of new social worlds. It recognizes that human thought and human intelli...

The 2008 excavations on the small island of Dhaskalio opposite Dhaskalio Kavos on the Cycladic island of Keros are reviewed. An account is given of the survey, recording many walls of the early Bronze Age, and of the excavations, continued from the 2007 season. Excavations at the summit of Dhaskalio revealed a substantial building 16 m long and 4 m...

In recent years, the archaeology of the Eurasian steppe has seen some remarkable advances. Up to a couple of decades ago, it seemed that little progress was being made, despite important archaeological discoveries in a number of relevant countries. The same rather simple models, based on an undifferentiated view of mobile steppe pastoralism and the...

Origins and Revolutions: Human Identity in Earliest Prehistory, by GambleClive, 2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ISBN-13 978-521-86002-4 hardback £50 & US$85; ISBN-13 978-0-521-67749-3 paperback £16.99 & US$29.99; xiii+352 pp., 40 figs., 46 tables - Volume 19 Issue 2 - Colin Renfrew

In the field of archaeology, demography has sometimes seemed something of a phantom science. Many explanatory models in archaeology have taken population density as a central theme. But the quantitative precision and broad sweep of the resulting formulations, scientific enough in their intentions, have often been undermined by the difficulties in t...

The Upper Palaeolithic era of Europe has left an abundance of evidence for symbolic activities, such as direct representations of animals and other features of the natural world, personal adornments, and elaborate burials, as well as other vestiges that are more abstract and cryptic. These behaviours are also exhibited by populations throughout the...

The turn of the twenty-first century has seen a new era in the cognitive and brain sciences that allows us to address the age-old question of what it means to be human from a whole new range of different perspectives. Our knowledge of the workings of the human brain increases day by day and so does our understanding of the extended, distributed, em...

Genetic data from human gastric bacteria provide independent support for a linguistic analysis of Pacific population dispersals.

The radiocarbon revolution may be seen in retrospect as the most decisive development in the archaeology of the 20th century. It is a pleasure, therefore, to have the opportunity of congratulating Radiocarbon on its jubilee celebration, and on the significant role that it has played in establishing a level of excellence in publication, against whic...

Colin Renfrew is a Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute and Emeritus Disney Professor of Archaeology in the University of Cambridge. His interest in cognitive archaeology (the archaeology of mind) has influenced the development of Material Engagement Theory, seeking to overcome the traditional mind/body dichotomy in the study of cultural evoluti...

Sotirakopoulou's Forum Article in this issue of the AJA, 1 like her valuable book The "Keros Hoard": Myth or Reality?, 2 takes its importance not so much from its subject matter or from the exemplary thoroughness of its treatment of the material as it does through the sig-nificance of the site from which much of that material may derive. The site o...