 Mae'r ystyried i'n meddwl am ymddangos ni wedi'i'n gwneud hynny, ond thank you for giving me the opportunity to present this via video. I want to talk about some thoughts that developed out of my work in early prehistory, looking at artifact scatters, and thinking about how, in early human evolution, people interacted with the residues of their own behaviour in landscapes, as well as those of other people. I hope this is a relevance beyond very early human evolution where we're just dealing with answer backs and certainly it's led me to start thinking about the way more purposeful placement of stones in the landscape may have played a role in our social interaction with each other, our social use of landscapes and especially thinking about how stones and landscapes working together with our capacity to invoke others, to invoke stories and to encode landscapes with information, leave potentially very complex and rich traces of past human behaviour in our prehistoric matters. Inspiration for this work really comes from the 1960s and 70s work Glen Isaac, working on early Pleistocene artefact scatters at sites such as Olygu Sailing and in West Ocarnau, where Glen Isaac was trying to get to grips with what do the fundamental particles of our research stone tools mean when we find them either in isolation or in different configurations. He tried to get to grips with the texture of archaeological signatures contrasting the dense patches which may represent particularly long-lived activity areas with the background scatters of isolated art. Dealing with the texture of the archaeological record in what he described as the scatters and patches terrain of artefact distribution in extensive paleo-land services, it came obsessed with wondering what is the fundamental particle that we need to deal with to understand past human behaviour. Is it the individual artefact representing the gesture of removal from a core potentially used as a tool to discard or should we be scaling up to seeing how different artefacts work together in other units such as a particular reduction sequence of a tool or a group artefact that is relating to human behaviour? The important thing is that these things are scalable and they are scalable in time. I think that the artefact itself, the individual tool, is the fundamental particle. It's only by looking at the dynamics and life history of individual artefacts. As part of a wider sense of the mapping scatter, the landscape, can we really build up a full range of dynamics in terms of human behaviour and in terms of the tachymagic processes that might be obscuring a correct interpretation. Were you well equipped as archaeologists to try and imagine how these artefacts play roles in the social and ecological behaviour of homining groups in deep tidal? Our entire discipline is built on identifying artefacts within landscapes and through correct interpretation and reading of that record, bringing into focus agency on an individual level and group dynamics over short term and long term time scouts. That's the fundamental part of what we do. That's a fundamentally archaeological process, that reading and that interpretation. We routinely work from identifying artefacts within a landscape, understanding their context, creating a very detailed record of their relationship to each other, their relationship to a depositional framework. From that, we reconstruct larger units of behaviour, whether through refitting a mapping scatter or whether through looking at an extended chain or through a twad, the way that the lithics are giving indications of other aspects of behaviour, use of organic materials, interaction with the environment and wider social groupings and social complexity. In this step-wise way, we invoke past human behaviour, we invoke past human agents and agency and this is effectively the ultimate goal and the ultimate product of our team. Our reconstructions of past human behaviour as well are directly triggered by our engagement with these objects. We are not immune from these same processes which would have acted upon our very early ancestors. We go from moving in landscapes, identifying and recognising objects as potentially being the result of human agency, where there's consensus in that we can sometimes harness huge resources and we can harness our own networks, whether those networks are social or academic or economic, to bring to bear a huge amount of human activity. Consider the trigger of finding an artifact in a particular context and thinking of its significance, either an artifact in an area where we didn't know humans were present or at a time where we didn't know humans were making artifacts and what that sets in trying a huge amount of social and economic complexity takes place through engagement with that artifact. This leads to an enormous amount of modification of the landscape, of the artifacts, of reconfiguration of our social and academic networks and a huge amount of focus. This is a fundamental part of our discipline and I think in some ways it informs just how posing these objects within landscapes could have been in the past to triggering and reconfiguring reconstructions of the past and no more than shadowy ghosts that have been invoked from a very basic record looked at in a very sophisticated way. But this invocation of others from static, isolated and sometimes long discarded material is something we instinctually do. Being instinctually doing outside of archaeology we do, moving into a room, looking at the objects around, decoding behaviours that may have happened there before. It's a way that we fundamentally as humans with a very well-developed sense of social complexity and understanding the relationship between material objects and potential social scenarios constantly being environments. Where we're dealing with very complicated sites where sometimes we have tens of thousands of fundamental particles, we need to rely on a huge multidisciplinary approach to filter out all the background noise of tachynoic processes, geological processes, overprinting of behavioural signatures to bring those individual processes into focus. But we can do this instantly and instinctually working through complex urban environments in our day-to-day life where you're constantly decoding these objects and their significance through their juxtaposition through any indication of timeline and time depth. We're now capable in lithic analysis and in decoding the nuts and bolts of our record, which is stone tools, of actually pulling out time depth. I like to think of the red shift of the lithic scatter. The scatter and patches maps that we're able to create from our surveys within landscapes are not two-dimensional maps past human behaviour, nor are they three-dimensional maps of landscape use within a single time block. They are fully four-dimensional products of humans moving in space, interacting with each other and interacting with their own material traces. Therefore, these traces are only constant shift prior to sealing in the sedimentary system and we have to be aware of just how complex those transmit. We need to see them in an artefact scatter or a ritual landscape that contains filled monuments, stone alignments, stone circles. These landscapes are built up over time. They are projects that are never complete and always in flux and always have the potential to change and any change, any multiplication is happening in direct response to the triggers that are already there within the land. Glyn Isaac's scatters and patches, although they are genuinely a good way of describing spatial variation, are also a great way of describing temporal variation. Simply put, first movements into a landscape may end up leaving a background trace, but over time certain parts of the landscape may become a focus for activity and end up with denser patch concentrations. These themselves may act as a pawn and a focus, but even increased intensity of working leading to mega sites where tens of thousands of artefacts are found. We need to get to grips with mysterious structures like the D. K. Stem Circle. Is it a structure as was originally thought, maybe an early hotline structure? Or is it just an accumulation of material around a tree where people found the shady affordance and kept on coming back to again and again? I think in some ways the overall interpretation, while important, is a secondary consideration to the fact that a particular behaviour, a particular trigger in that behaviour leads to a compelling, concentrated and apparently self-organised distribution of stone archbacks at one place in the landscape. And I think this is the fundamental phenomena that we should be looking at. The tendency where a landscape is long lived and particles are moving as part of human social and ecological patterns for, even at an early stage, over two million years ago, for very organised patterns to begin to emerge. We also need to think about these patterns of intense concentration as providing affordances. If you have a landscape which is pulling people back again and again over a long period of time, acting as a draw and allowing dense concentrations to assist, and those dense concentrations of material themselves have a utility. They're a source of raw material. They're a source of tools that can essentially be recycled. They act as a marker in the landscape, showing human occupation patterns. They potentially encode very basic information about the resources and behaviours that took place there before. But if you've got a hominine capable of decoding that information, it's an information resource in itself. In this sense, as these concentrations increase, what we may be seeing is a form of niche construction. Actually enabling and enhancing the human use of space as these effectively cultural landscapes start to develop a texture and a vote. I've talked about these things a couple of times before with relevance to the Ashilean. Thinking about how highly structured discard environments may have acted as an advantage in early stages of human evolution is a couple of quotes. Where environmental conditions remain stable by face rich signatures would have marked off to more locales for resource exploitation, allowing basic information to be transmitted. Later on, just as these areas signal specific patterns of group behaviour to the archaeologists, even basic associative reinforcement would have marked such sites as socially significant hominin groups. I do not believe early hominins developing social complexity, developing an evolutionary path that was tightly enmeshed and entangled with this technology would have disregarded and ignored that technology as a source of information. We can see in the archaeological record that we test this by looking for direct interaction of paper and rum, and myself and Madalera has got coming out soon. Looks very specifically at patterns of reuse and resharpening in large artifact accumulations where artifacts have a chance to weather in the landscape before being picked up and reused. This is a passive utility, probably, but it's a utility nonetheless, giving an adaptive advantage to any hominin that's concentrating just the tools they need within a landscape where perhaps those raw materials are not very easily available. So, I like to muse that once we started leaving the step tools in large numbers in the landscape, we'd crossed a kind of threshold. I'm calling it today the Hansel and Gretel threshold. The climates have a large range of organic tools that they draw up. These are things that are going to be very fragile and very easily subjected to diogenesis and rotting and dispersal. We know that when Hansel and Gretel were trying to make sense of their environment, when they were using organic markers, like the trails of bread that got eaten by the birds, they were in a very perilous situation. When we started using stone tools, we were starting to use more durable markers. Now we've got an archaeological record because of stone technology going back 3.3 million years ago. It's anyone's guess when early primates started using stone tools for activities like cracking nuts. But as soon as you've got this more durable, more resilient marker in the landscape, just like Hansel and Gretel's trails of pebbles, you suddenly have something you can tend to be working with. And I think once we started leaving these durable traces, at least the possibility for interaction with them and co-evolution with these traces was possible. Leaving potentially quite visible and durable markers of our movement, our recombination, our exploitation. If this is right, we follow through the logic here that humans are leaving durable traces and they're interacting with them and they're triggering changes in behaviour. What we effectively have is a process of stigmergy occurring. Stigmergy is a process of indirect communication and learning by the environment which we find in social insects. Ants provide a really good case study. They leave pheromone traces which other ant individuals interact with, pick up very simple information from and then redirect their own behaviour. We don't leave scent traces. We don't go marking up against trees or leaving powerful pheromones thing. I've just found a food resource. How do we decode? Well, I think the simplest way we decode is by using our visual capabilities and by semiosis. By looking at visible signs in the landscape, whether that be simple trail markers like footprints or broken twigs or a blood trail, or more complex intentional markers, fully semiotic, culturally aware markers in the landscape. Semiosis is something we do incredibly. It underpins very complex social structures, very complex patterns of foraging and recombination and resource sharing. In humans, our very complex urban environments, the way we move around them, the way we organise traffic, public transport, pedestrian movement, finding resources, finding our way to and from our places of living, are entirely encoded through very overt signs and signals. Semiosis is the way that we make sense and perform the miracle of self-organisation. If we look back into the archaeological record, we may be seeing some of the individual steps towards this incredible capacity through our interaction with durable markers of our past behaviour left in the landscape. Marks that we still hone in on very quickly and very easily and find significant today. Seen in this point in time, these densely structured accumulations of material are an amplification of and underlyingly valuable. But I want us to think that we're kind of just like zombies blindly just responding to triggers in landscapes. The way we undertake semiosis is actually embedded in one of our other great adaptations, and it's not something that we're carrying out mindlessly. Our large brains, as we envisage from the social brain hypothesis developed within human evolutionary studies by Robin Dunbar, Clyde Gamble and John Gallagher sees the development of social cognition as underpinning the development of so much in the human brain and so much of our capacity to organise as very complex social groups within landscapes. And it's this social cognition that I think stands a good for being extended to decoding our material landscapes. And if there is something significant about objects in landscapes once they start being placed intentionally, it's not necessarily just there at the intention behind the original placement of a stone or the original erection of a monument, but it's about the potential it has for reinvention and transformation. Raise a stone in a landscape, drop a significant object and it has a gravity, a gravity that attracts human attention, attracts stories, attracts information. It rapidly has the potential therefore to increase encoding of those relationships. And I think seeing the stories and myths and social information as a dark matter that we can never fully know, but we can almost detect by its presence and potential to exist within landscapes, provides a model for thinking about our landscapes as being fields of differential gravity. In this sense, I think we should pay attention to myths and folklore that are attached to places and to objects and to prehistoric structures within the landscape, because I believe they are directly analogous, if however corrupt and fragmented, to the kinds of information that could be encoded in and see it as a spontaneous arising of a very natural interaction from a heavily developed extended social cognition that's part of our evolutionary legacy and the traces we leave on the landscape through both incidental and purposeful construction. I'll stop there and thank you.