‘Fons: Primordial Origins from Myth to Archaeology’
Magdalene College, Cambridge
5-6 November 2025
The origin of humanity is a subject of inexhaustible allure and controversy. From classical antiquity to the advent of modern archaeology and anthropology, theories of primordial savagery, privation, nobility and perfection have been used to anchor the present and envision the future. In the early modern period, the expansion of colonial networks bringing reports of newly contacted Amerindian societies coincided with a European movement to recover the ancient ‘sources’ (fontes) of culture. As European consciousness expanded across space and time, humanists and antiquaries, from Polydore Virgil to Giordano Bruno and Jean Bodin, forged speculative theories of the origin of human life, arts and civilisation – modifying or even outright contradicting the Genesis narrative – in dialogue with the ethnography of new world peoples. From the Renaissance to today, narratives of ancestral origin have served as a vehicle for the critique of decadence and a means of inscribing cultural and ethnic hierarchy, alienating others from the category of the civilised, the articulate and the human. David Wengrow and David Graeber’s pathbreaking study of early humanity, The Dawn of Everything (2021), has exposed the ideological foundations of this tradition in its post-Enlightenment phase, prompting deeper cross-disciplinary inquiry into the sources and evolution of the primordial imaginary in the longue durée.
The event will feature keynote addresses by Prof. Charles Foster, Senior Research Associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and Dr. Liliana Janik, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Heritage at the University of Cambridge.
The full programme and registration link are available here.