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Keynote Speaker

Prof Robert L. Kelly

Lessons from the Past will host Prof Robert L. Kelly as a keynote speaker.

Professor Kelly is an internationally-known authority on the archaeology and ethnology of hunting and gathering societies. He has participated in research projects in western North America since 1973. He is a past-president of the Society for American Archaeology (2001-2003), and past-editor (2015-2018) of the Society’s flagship journal, American Antiquity. 

He has authored over 100 articles, reviews, and books, including two archaeology textbooks, Archaeology, in its 7th edition, and Archaeology: Down to Earth, in its 5th edition, both co-authored with David Hurst Thomas; The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers (Cambridge University Press, 2013); The Foraging Spectrum (Smithsonian, 1995), and The Fifth Beginning: What Six Million Years of Human History Can Tell us About Our Future (October, 2016; translated to Chinese, 2018).

In 2017, he received a Senior Humboldt Research Award (Germany). He has served as a department head (9 years) and Director of the Frison Institute (3 years). He has lectured in many countries, has received over $1.3 million in grant funding, and currently researchers the use of radiocarbon dates as measures of prehistoric population, long-term effects of demography and climate as a rockshelter in the Bighorn Mountains, ice patch archaeology in the Rocky Mountains, and palaeoindian mammoth hunting.

Keynote Abstract

Learning from the Past how to Build the Future.

Humanity’s global past, which encompasses many millennia, environments, and adaptations, is the only laboratory we have for understanding human behavior as it is manifested over long spans of time and great reaches of geography. Since 1905, when George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” we have taken the past as only a vague warning: don’t do that again! But can the past offer us something more, not a prediction but a prescription for the future? In this talk I’ll briefly review the argument of my 2016 book, The Fifth Beginning, and consider the processes at work today that are driving change, and what we might do to direct that change to create the life we all seek: one of global peace and prosperity.