Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture Prior Recipients

Home Awards Honours Prior Recipients Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture Prior Recipients
2025Professor Didier Fassin  
2024Professor Alex de Waal‘Anthropology and the Humanitarian Encounter: Famine, Societal Trauma and the Academy’ 
2023Professor Chirs Stringer‘Mostly Out of Africa: how, when and where’ 
2022Professor Marcia Langton(no lecture) 
2021Professor Stephen Shennan‘Population and the dynamics of culture change’ 
2020Professor Stephen Levinson‘The ‘interaction engine’: the evolution of the infrastructure for language’ 



 
2019Professor Chris Hann‘Economy and Ethics in the Cosmic Process’ 
2018Professor Anna Tsing‘The More-than-Human Anthropocene’ 
2017Professor Margaret Conkey‘Field Walking, Walking the Field: Anthropological Archaeology as Viewed from Deep Time’ 
2016Professor Margaret Lock‘Moveable Environments and the Permeable Human Body’ 
2015Professor Robin Dunbar‘Dunbar’s Number: How Constrained Is Your Social World?’ 
2014Professor Tim Ingold‘On Human Correspondence’ 
2013Professor Howard Morphy‘Extended Lives in Global Spaces: The Anthropology of Yolngu Pre Burial Ceremonies’ 
2012Professor Alan MacFarlane‘Anthropology, Empire and Modernity’ 
2011Professor Bruce Kapferer‘How Anthropologists Think: Refiguring the Exotic’ 
2010Professor Johannes Fabian‘Cultural Anthropology and the Question of Knowledge’ 



 
2009Professor Ian Hodder‘Human – Thing Entanglement: Towards an Integrated Archaeological Perspective’ 
2008Professor Maurice Godelier‘Community, Society, Culture: Three Keys to Understanding Today’s Conflicted Identities’ 
2007Professor Adam Kuper‘Changing the Subject’ 
2006Professor Leslie Aiello‘Diet, Energy and Human Evolution’ 
2005Professor Peter Ucko‘”Forms Such as Never Were in Nature”: Forging Authenticity’ 
2004Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern‘A Community of Critics?’ 
2003Professor Emeritus Gannanath Obeyesekere‘Cannibal Talk: Dialogical Misunderstandings in the South Seas’ 
2002Dr Jane Goodall, CBE‘The Scientific Study of Primates and its Impact on Contemporary World-Views’ 
2001Professor John Middleton‘Merchants’ 
2000Professor Pierre Bourdieu‘Participant Objectivation: Breaching the Boundary Between Anthropology and Sociology – How?’ 



 
1999Professor Sally Falk Moore‘Certanties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949-1999’ 
1998Professor Marshall Sahlins‘Two or Three Things that I know about Culture’ 
1997Professor Stanley Tambiah‘Transnational Movements, Multiculturalism and Ethnonationalism’ 
1996Professor Philip Tobias‘The Ape-like Australopithecus after 70 Years: Was it Hominid?’ 
1995Professor Jack Goody‘A Kernel of Doubt: Agnosticism in Cultural and Cross-Cultural Perspective’ 
1994Professor Sidney W. Mintz‘Enduring Substances and Trying Theories: the Caribbean Region as Oikumenê’ 
1993Professor George Stocking‘Reading the Palimpsest of Enquiry: “Notes and Queries” and the History of Social Anthropology 
1992Professor Mary Douglas‘The Talking Donkey: Balam’s Story in The Book of Numbers (Chapters 22-24)’ 
1991Professor Colin Renfrew‘Archaeology, Genetics and Linguistic Diversity: a New Synthesis?’ 
1990Professor Robert Hinde‘A Biologist looks at Anthropology’ 



 
1989Professor Fredrik Barth‘Transmission, and the Shaping of Culture in Asia and Melanesia’ 
1988Dr. Carleton Gajdusek‘New Plagues – Old Scourges: Epidemics of Brain Disease in Population Isolates in the Twentieth Century’ 
1987Professor G. Ainsworth Harrison‘Social Heterogeneity and Biological Variation’ 
1986Professor Lewis Binford‘Date, Relativism and Archaeological Science: Looking at, Thinking about and Inferring the Past’ 
1985Professor Louis Dumont‘Are Cultures Living Beings? German Identity in Interaction’ 
1984Professor Junichiro Itani‘The Evolution of Primate Social Structure’ 
1983Professor Clifford Geertz‘Culture and Change: The Indonesian Case’ 
1982Professor Paul T. Baker‘Adaptive Limits of Human Populations’ 
1981Professor Fei Hsiao-Tung‘Some Observations on the Transformation of Rural China’ 
1980Professor Sir Edmund Leach‘Why did Moses have a Sister’ 



 
1979Professor Gordon Willey‘Towards a Holistic View of Ancient Maya Civilizations’ 
1978Professor J.S. Weiner‘Beyond Physical Anthropology 
1977Professor M. Fortes‘Sacrifice, or was your Fieldwork really Necessary’ 
1976Professor M.N. Srinivas‘The Changing Position of Indian Women’ 
1975Professor G. Reichel-Dolmatoff‘Cosmology as Ecological Analysis: a View from the Rain-Forest’ 
1974Professor J.D. Clark‘Africa in Prehistory: Peripheral or Paramount?’ 
1973Professor K. Wachsmann‘Spencer to Hood: a Changing View of Non-European Music’ 
1972Professor L.L. Cavalli-Sforza‘Human Races: Their Origin and Differentiation’ 
1971Professor G.P. Murdock‘Anthropology’s Mythology’ 
1970Professor C.D. Forde‘Ecology and the Social Structure’ 



 
1969Professor I. Schapera‘The Crime of Sorcery’ 
1968G.H. Rivière‘My experience at the Musée d’Ethnologie’ 
1967S.L. Washburn‘Behaviour and the Origin of Man’ 
1966J.E.S. Thompson‘The Maya Central Area’ 
1965Professor C. Lévi-Strauss`The Future of Kinship Studies’ 
1964Professor G.H.R. Von Koenigswald`The Early Man’ 
1963Professor E.E. Evans-Pritchard`The Zande State’ 
1962D.A.E. Garrod`The Middle Palaeolithic of the Near East’ 
1961Dr. A.E. Mourant`Evolution, Genetics and Anthropology’ 
1960Dr. S. Lothrop`Early Migrations to Central and South America’ 



 
1959Professor R. Firth`Problems and Assumptions in an Anthropological Study of Religion’ 
1958Professor Sir Wilfrid Le Gros Clark`Bones of Contention’ 
1957Professor J.E.S. Linne`Technical Secrets of American Indians’ 
1956Professor J.B.S. Haldane`The Argument from Animals to Men: an Examination of its validity for Anthropologists’ 
1955Professor Robert Redfield`Societies and Cultures as Natural Systems’; Professor F. Wood-Jones (no lecture due to death) 
1954Professor Henri V. Vallois`Neanderthals and Praesapiens’; Professor Ralph Linton (no lecture due to death) 
1953Professor M. Ginsberg`On the Diversity of Morals’ 
1952Professor Kaj Hirkett-Smith`The History of Ethnology in Denmark’; Sir Peter Buck `The Rangi Niroa’ (no lecture due to death) 
1951Professor A.R. Radcliffe-Brown`The Comparative Method in Social Anthropology’ 
1950Dr. Julian S. Huxley`New Bottles for New Wine: Ideology and Scientific Knowledge’ 



 
1949James Hornell(no lecture due to death) 
1948Professor Robert H. Lowie`Some Aspects of Political Organization among American Aborigines’ 
1947Dr. W.L.H. Duckworth`Some Complexities of Human Structure’ 
1946Miss G. Caton-Thompson`The Aterian Industry: its Place and Significance in the Palaeolithic World’ 
1945Professor A.L. Kroeber`The Ancient Oikumene as an historic Culture Aggregate’ 
1944Professor V. Gordon Childe`Archaeological Ages as Technological Stages’ 
1943Professor F.C. Bartlett`Anthropology in Reconstruction’ 
1942Sir Leonard \Woolley`North Syria as a Cultural Link in the Ancient World’ 
1941Professor Henri Breuil`The Discovery of the Antiquity of Man’ (Lecture postponed due to World War II) 
1940H.J.E. Peake`The Study of Prehistoric Times’ 



 
1939Dr. R.R. Marett`Charity and the Struggle for Existence’ 
1938Professor Marcel Mauss`Une Categorie de l’Esprit Humain: la Notion de Personnne, celle de “Moi”‘ 
1937Professor H.J. Fleure`Racial Evolution and Archaeology’ 
1936Professor Edward Westermarck`Methods in Social Anthropology’ 
1935Sir Grafton Elliott Smith`The Place of Thomas Henry Huxley in Anthropology’ 
1934Sir Aurel Stein`The Indo-European Borderlands: their Prehistory in the light of Geography and of recent Explorations’ 
1933Professor J.L. Myers`The Cretian Labyrinth: a Retrospect for Aegen Research’ 
1932Professor C.G. Seligman`Anthropological Perspective and Psychological Theory’ 
1931Dr. Georg. Thilenius`On some Biological Viewpoints in Ethnology’ 
1930Professor A.H. Sayce`The Antiquity of Civilized Man’ 



 
1929Erlan Nordenskiold`The American Indian as an Inventor’ 
1928Sir Arthur Keith`The Evolution of the Human Race’ 
1927Dr. Ales Hrdlicka`The Neanderthal Phase of Man’ 
1926Sir William Ridgeway(posthumously) 
1925Sir Arthus Evans`The Early Nilogic, Libyan and Egyptian Relations with Minoan Crete’ 
1924Professor R. Verneau`La Race de Neanderthal et la Race de Grimaldi; leur Rôle dans l’Humanité’ 
1923Dr. E.S. Hartland(no lecture due to ill-health) 
1922Professor Marcelin Boule`l’Oeuvre Anthropologie du Prince Albert Ier de Monaco et les recents Progres de la Paleontologie humaine en France’ 
1921Henry Balfour`The Archer’s Bow in the Homeric Poems’ 
1920A.C. Haddon`Migrations of Culture in British New Guinea’ 



 
1919 None 
1918 None 
1917 None 
1916Sir James G. Frazer`Ancient Stories of a Great Flood’ 
1915M. Emile Catailhac(no lecture due to World War I) 
1914 None 
1913Professor W. J. Sollas`Paviland Cave: an Aurignacian Station in Wales’ 
1912William Gowland`The Metals in Antiquity’ 
1911Felix von Luschan`The Early Inhabitants of Western Asia’ 
1910W. Boyd Dawkins`The Arrival of Man in Britain in the Pleistocene Age’ 



 
1909Professor Gustaf Retzius`The so-called North European Races of Mankind’ 
1908William Z. Ripley`The European Population of the United States’ 
1907Edward Barnett Tylor(no lecture) 
1906Professor W.M. Flinders Petrie`Migrations’ 
1905John Beddoe`Colour and Race’ 
1904Dr. J. Deniker`Les six Races composant la Pouplation Actuelle de l’Europe’ 
1903Karl Pearson`On the Inheritance of the Mental and Moral Character’ 
1902Dr. D.J. Cunningham`Right-handedness and Lef-brainedness’ 
1901Sir Francis Galton`The Possible Movement of the Human Breed under the existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment’ 
1900Lord Avebury`Huxley, The Man and his Work’