Keynote Speaker

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.