第一讲：模式2技术何以特殊？

What’s so special about Mode 2?

Mode 2 or Acheulean lithic technology, and especially the iconic artifacts such as handaxes and cleavers, have occupied the attention of archaeologists and other scientists for more than a century. One enduring question is why Mode 2 technologies and artifact forms persist across vast areas for more than one million years. In this lecture I review the evidence for stability and change across multiple domains of Acheulean assemblages. In the end, what persists are a few basic features of handaxes, the bauplan. What varies across time and space are the technologies by which the basic form is achieved and maintained. This reframes the basic questions about why the artifacts persist, and what they imply about hominin behavior and cognition.

时间：2026年10月14日 18:30-20:30

地点：考古楼A座101室

主持：李锋

第二讲：中更新世的文化转变

Middle Pleistocene transitions

Hominin cultures of the Middle Pleistocene (Chibanian) stage have long been viewed as a sort of poorly-defined transition phase, bridging more “important” developments of the Early and Late Pleistocene. Recent findings suggest that several fundamental changes in hominin culture and behavior unfolded during this period. These developments are known mainly from material culture and stone tools, but they have much broader implications for human evolution. This talk reviews some basic findings about technologies and hominin biogeography during the Middle Pleistocene. I argue that two particularly consequential evolutionary developments, 1) the absolute dependence of hominins on technology, and 2) the re-organization of economic and social life around multi-purpose home bases, emerged during the later half of the Middle Pleistocene, around 500-400,000 years ago. These developments had profound implications for subsequent cultural and cognitive evolution.

时间：2026年10月15日 18:30-20:30

地点：考古楼A座101室

主持：李锋

第三讲：停滞还是稳定？创新还是无序？——旧石器时代中期与非洲石器时代中期的宏观演化变迁

Stagnation or stability? Innovation or chaos? Macro-evolutionary change in the Middle Paleolithic and MSA

In western accounts of human cultural evolution, continuity in archaeological material culture is often interpreted as stagnation, whereas turnover in archaeological cultures is seen to represent creativity and innovation. In deep time, Paleolithic frames, innovation is seen as a feature of Homo sapiens, whereas stability or stagnation are thought to be typical of earlier hominins. In this talk, I review case studies from Africa and Eurasia demonstrating that the same hominin taxa can exhibit radically different degrees of cultural continuity/turnover. The degree of stability or change in these cultural sequences is not related to the basic capacities of hominins involved. Instead, it seems to be correlated with the scale of environmental variation or stability during the late Middle and Upper Pleistocene. These observations have a number of implications for how we understand culture change over long periods, and our expectations about dynamics of cultural evolution in different parts of the globe.

时间：2026年10月16日 18:30-20:30

地点：考古楼A座101室

主持：李锋

主讲介绍

Steven Kuhn，美国亚利桑那大学人类学系荣休教授，也是旧石器时代考古学领域的国际知名学者。四十余年来，他长期致力于地中海欧洲、近东、土耳其及巴尔干地区、摩洛哥和中国等地旧石器时代遗址及石器组合的研究，重点探讨石制品及其制作方式如何反映古人类不断变化的适应策略与认知能力，以及物质文化在人类生活和适应过程中所发挥的作用。Kuhn教授在石制品分析领域贡献卓著，提出并发展了多个具有重要影响力的研究视角与分析方法，推动了旧石器时代技术与行为研究的发展。2017年，他因在石制品分析领域的杰出贡献，荣获美国考古学会颁发的“石制品分析杰出贡献奖”。Kuhn教授著述丰富，出版 Mousterian Lithic Technology: An Ecological Perspective、The Evolution of Paleolithic Technologies 等重要学术著作，并在PNAS、Science Advances、Journal of Human Evolution等国际知名学术期刊发表论文百余篇。