Do Communities Build Monuments or Do Monuments Build Communities?
- Date
- Wednesday 25 February 2026
- Time
- Address
- National Museum of Antiquities
Rapenburg 28
2311 TV Leiden - Room
- Trajanuszaal
This workshop focuses on cooperation, resilience, and collective identities in the prehistoric societies of southeastern Türkiye and wider southwest Asia. It follows the public lecture on 24 February by Prof. Necmi Karul on the Taş Tepeler sites of southeastern Türkiye, most notably Göbekli Tepe and Karahantepe, which have transformed our understanding of prehistoric social organisation. These sites demonstrate how communities with limited material resources and without formal social hierarchies were able to coordinate labour and knowledge to create large-scale, symbolically charged communal architecture.
By bringing together questions of monumentality, mobility, environment, and social differentiation, the workshop explores how early communities were formed and transformed through collective practices.
The keynote lecture by Prof. Douglas Baird focuses on his excavations at Mendik, part of a cluster of Neolithic sites in the Urfa region that contain large, communal buildings representing some of the earliest known corporate institutions. Discussing how these structures provide an important context for understanding the development of collective decision-making and long-term cooperation, Baird will open the first open panel round.
Three short thematic contributions will then extend the discussion. Dr. Jo-Hannah Plug will show how research on human mobility and mortuary practices can shed light on the ways early farming communities balanced group belonging with inclusivity. Dr. Pascal Flohr will address human-environment interactions and climate variability, highlighting the role of cooperation in Neolithic resilience. Finally, Prof. Bleda Düring will examine how and why inequality emerged within early village communities.
Participants
Moderators:
- Jo-Hannah Plug (University of Oxford)
- David Kertai (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden)
Participants:
- Douglas Baird (University of Liverpool)
- Bleda Düring (Leiden University)
- Jo-Hannah Plug (University of Oxford)
- Pascal Flohr (Leiden University)
- Necmi Karul (Istanbul University)
Programme
10.15 Welcome
10.30 Introduction and Keynote by Douglas Baird
11.30 Group belonging (introduction by Jo-Hannah Plug)
12.00 Resilience (introduction by Pascal Flohr)
12.30 Inequality (introduction by Bleda Düring)
13:00 End