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3:30 pm, Sunday 20th September, Welshmans Reef Winery
Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies
Dr Lynne Kelly
Knowledge and Power has just been published by Cambridge University Press. It is the work of Dr Lynne Kelly, from Castlemaine, who will talk to us about her ground-breaking theory in this area.
Why did the Neolithic Brits build Stonehenge and then keep changing it over 1500 years? How did Australian Aboriginal cultures manage to remember vast amounts of scientific and other practical information when they could not write it down?
Answer the second question and you have a solution to the first. The same patterns can then be seen in a huge range of non-literate cultures, and then in mysterious monuments the world over: stone circles and megalithic chambers all over Britain and Ireland, the statues of Easter Island, the Nazca lines on the plains of Peru, the mound builders along the Mississippi, and the incredible Ancestral Puebloan buildings of the American southwest among many others.
Dr Lynne Kelly from La Trobe University is an expert in primary orality, the way communication and knowledge systems work in cultures which have no contact with writing. She has applied these ideas into the archaeological context in her doctoral research and her book, 'Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies', published by Cambridge University Press.
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