Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture

This article is about the Huxley Memorial Lecture of the Royal Anthropological Institute. For the Huxley Lecture of Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, see The Huxley Lecture.

The Huxley Memorial Medal and Lecture is a lecture and associated medal that was created in 1900 by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to honour the anthropologist Thomas Henry Huxley.^[1] The lecture and medal are awarded annually to any scientist who distinguishes themselves in any field of anthropological research.^[1] Thomas Huxley was fortunate to have another memorial lecture named his honour, The Huxley Lecture that was instituted by the members of Charing Cross Hospital Medical School in 1896.^[2]

The Huxley memorial medallion in bronze created by Frank Boucher

Huxley had been a member of both the Ethnological Society of London (ESL) and the Anthropological Society of London since 1863, and he was President of the ESL during its last two years,^[3] and Vice President of the Institute when John Lubbock, Lord Avebury was President. A Huxley Lecture Committee was convened in May 1896, which decided that scientist should be invited to deliver a lecture to honour Huxley.^[4]

Recipients

Year	Laureate	Nationality	Title	Date	Ref
1900	Lord Avebury	United Kingdom	"Huxley, the man and his work"	13 November 1900	[5]
1901	Francis Galton	United Kingdom	"The possible improvement of the human breed under existing conditions of law and sentiment"	29 October 1901	[6]
1902	Daniel John Cunningham	United Kingdom	"Right-handedness and left-brainedness"	28 October 1902	[7]
1903	Karl Pearson	United Kingdom	"On the inheritance in man of mental and moral characters, and its relation to the inheritance of physical characters"	16 October 1903	[8]
1904	Joseph Deniker	France	"The six races that make up the current population of Europe"	7 October 1904	[9]
1905	John Beddoe	United Kingdom	"Colour and race"	31 October 1905	[10]
1906	Flinders Petrie	United Kingdom	"Migrations"	1 November 1906"	[11]
1907	Edward Burnett Tylor	United Kingdom	Awarded the Huxley medal on 5 November 1907	5 November 1907	[12]
1908	William Z. Ripley	United States	"The European population of the United States"	13 November 1908	[13]
1909	Gustaf Retzius	Sweden	"The so-called North European race of mankind: a review of and views on the development of some anthropological questions"	5 November 1909	[14]
1910	William Boyd Dawkins	United Kingdom	"The arrival of man in Britain in the Pleistocene age"	22 November 1910	[15]
1911	Felix von Luschan	Austrian Empire	"The early inhabitants of Western Asia"	23 November 1911	[16]
1912	William Gowland	United Kingdom	"The metals in antiquity"	19 November 1912	[17]
1913	William Johnson Sollas	United Kingdom	Paviland Cave: an Aurignacian station in Wales	14 November 1913	[18]
1914	James George Frazer	United Kingdom	For the presentation of the Huxley medal		[12]
1915	Émile Cartailhac	France	For the presentation of the Huxley medal		[12]
1916	James George Frazer	United Kingdom	"Ancient stories of a great flood"	14 November 1916	[19]
1917			No medal was given nor lecture held. Likely due to World War I		[12]
1918			No mention of the lecture being held.		[12]
1919			No mention of the lecture being held.		[12]
1920	Alfred Cort Haddon	United Kingdom	"Migrations of cultures in British New Guinea"	23 November 1920	[20]
1921	Henry Balfour	United Kingdom	"The archer's bow in the Homeric poems: an attempted diagnosis"	1 September 1921	[21]
1922	Marcellin Boule	France	"L’oeuvre anthropologique du Prince Albert 1er de Monaco et les récents progrès de la Paléontologie humaine en France"	Never delivered	[22]
1923	Edwin Sidney Hartland	United Kingdom	Hartland was awarded the Huxley Medal in 1922 but was not able to prepare and deliver the Huxley Memorial Lecture owing to his health		[12]
1924	René Verneau	France	"La race de Néanderthal et la race de Grimaldi: leur rôle dans l’Humanité"	25 November 1924	[12]
1925	Arthur John Evans	United Kingdom	"The early Nilotic, Libyan and Egyptian relations with Minoan Crete"	24 November 1925	[12]
1926	William Ridgeway	United Kingdom	The death of William Ridgeway meant the Huxley Memorial Lecture was not delivered		[12]
1927	Aleš Hrdlička	United States	"The Neanderthal phase of man"	Unknown	[23]
1928	Arthur Keith	United Kingdom	"The evolution of the human races"	27 November 1928	[24]
1929	Erland Nordenskiöld	Sweden	"The American Indian as an inventor"	26 November 1929	[25]
1930	Archibald H. Sayce	United Kingdom	"The antiquity of civilized man"	18 November 1930	[26]
1931	Georg Thilenius	Germany	"On some biological view-points in ethnology"	29 September 1931	[27]
1932	Charles Gabriel Seligman	United Kingdom	"Anthropological perspective and psychological theory"	29 November 1932	[28]
1933	John Linton Myres	United Kingdom	"The Cretan labyrinth: a retrospect of Aegean research"	28 November 1933	[29]
1934	Marc Aurel Stein	United Kingdom	"The Indo-Iranian borderlands: their prehistory in the light of geography and of recent explorations"	31 July 1934	[30]
1935	Grafton Elliot Smith	Australia	"The place of Thomas Henry Huxley in anthropology"	26 November 1935	[31]
1936	Edward Westermarck	Finland	"Methods in social anthropology"	27 October 1936	[32]
1937	Herbert John Fleure	United Kingdom	"Racial evolution and archaeology"	9 November 1937	[33]
1938	Marcel Mauss	France	"Une catégorie de l’esprit humain: la notion de personne, celle de ‘moi’: un plan de travail"	29 November 1938	[34]
1939	Robert Ranulph Marett	United Kingdom	"Charity and the struggle for existence"	28 November 1939	[35]
1940	Harold John Edward Peake	United Kingdom	"The study of prehistoric times"	26 November 1940	[36]
1941	Henri Breuil	France	"The discovery of the antiquity of man: some of the evidence"	16 April 1946	[37]
1942	Charles Leonard Woolley	United Kingdom	"North Syria as a cultural link in the ancient world"	24 November 1942	[38]
1943	Frederic Charles Bartlett	United Kingdom	"Anthropology in reconstruction"	23 November 1943	[39]
1944	V. Gordon Childe	Australia	"Archaeological ages as technological stages"		[40]
1945	Alfred Kroeber	United States	"The ancient Oikoumenê as an historic culture aggregate"		[41]
1946	Gertrude Caton Thompson	United Kingdom	"The Aterian industry: its place and significance in the Palaeolithic world"	6 May 1946	[42]
1947	Wynfrid Duckworth	United Kingdom	"Some complexities of human structure"	25 November 1947	[43]
1948	Robert Lowie	United States	"Some aspects of political organization among the American aborigines"		[44]
1949	James Hornell	United Kingdom	Died before delivery of lecture
1950	Julian Huxley	United Kingdom	"New bottles for new wine: ideology and scientific knowledge"	28 November 1950	[45]
1951	Alfred Radcliffe-Brown	United Kingdom	"The comparative method in social anthropology"		[46]
1952	Peter Buck	New Zealand	Died before delivery of lecture
1952	Kaj Birket-Smith	Denmark	"The history of ethnology in Denmark"		[47]
1953	Morris Ginsberg	United Kingdom	"On the diversity of morals"	26 November 1953	[48]
1954	Ralph Linton	United States	Died before delivery of lecture
1954	Henri Victor Vallois	France	"Neanderthals and Praesapiens"	25 November 1954
1955	Frederic Wood Jones	United Kingdom	Died before delivery of lecture
1955	Robert Redfield	United States	"Societies and cultures as natural systems"	22 March 1955	[49]
1956	J. B. S. Haldane	United Kingdom	"The argument from animals to men: an examination of its validity for anthropology"	29 November 1956	[50]
1957	Sigvald Linné	Sweden	"Technical secrets of American Indians"	28 November 1957	[51]
1958	Wilfrid Le Gros Clark	United Kingdom	"Bones of contention"	28 November 1957	[52]
1959	Raymond Firth	New Zealand	"Problem and assumption in an anthropological study of religion"		[53]
1960	Samuel Kirkland Lothrop	United States	"Early migration to central and south America"	25 November 1960	[54]
1961	Arthur Mourant	United Kingdom	"Evolution, genetics and anthropology"	24 November 1961	[55]
1962	Dorothy Garrod	United Kingdom	"The middle Palaeolithic of the near east and the problem of Mount Carmel man"	2 November 1962	[56]
1963	E. E. Evans-Pritchard	United Kingdom	"The Zande state"	27 June 1963	[57]
1964	Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald	West Germany	"Early man facts and fantasy"	2 April 1964	[58]
1965	Claude Lévi-Strauss	France	"The future of kinship studies"		[59]
1966	J. Eric S. Thompson	United Kingdom	"The Maya central area at the Spanish Conquest and later: a problem in demography"		[60]
1967	Sherwood Washburn	United States	"Behaviour and the origin of man"		[61]
1968	Georges Henri Rivière	France	"My experience at the Musée d’Ethnologie"		[62]
1969	Isaac Schapera	United Kingdom	"The crime of sorcery"		[63]
1970	Daryll Forde	United Kingdom	"Ecology and social structure"		[64]
1971	George Murdock	United States	"Anthropology’s mythology"		[65]
1972	Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza	Italy	"Origin and differentiation of human races"		[66]
1973	Klaus Wachsmann	United Kingdom	"Spencer to Hood: a changing view of non-European music"		[67]
1974	J. Desmond Clark	United Kingdom	"Africa in prehistory: peripheral or paramount?"	7 November 1974	[68]
1975	Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff	Austria	"Cosmology as ecological analysis: a view from the rain forest"	27 November 1975	[69]
1976	M. N. Srinivas	India	"The changing position of Indian women"	25 November 1976	[70]
1977	Meyer Fortes	South Africa	"Sacrifice, or was your fieldwork really necessary?"	unknown
1978	Joseph Weiner	United Kingdom	"Beyond physical anthropology"	8 November 1978	[71]
1979	Gordon Willey	United States	"Towards a holistic view of ancient Maya civilizations"	7 November 1979	[72]
1980	Edmund Leach	United Kingdom	"Why did Moses have a sister?"	21 November 1980	[73]
1981	Fei Hsiao-Tung	China	"Some observations on the transformation of rural China"	18 November 1981	[74]
1982	Paul Thornell Baker	United States	"Adaptive limits of human populations"	17 November 1982	[75]
1983	Clifford Geertz	United States	"Culture and change: the indonesian case"	1 February 1983	[76]
1984	Junichiro Itani	Japan	"The evolution of primate social structure"	21 November 1984	[77]
1985	Louis Dumont	France	"Are cultures living beings? German identity in interaction"	14 November 1985	[78]
1986	Lewis Binford	United States	"Data, relativism and archaeological science: looking at, thinking about and inferring the past"	17 September 1986	[79]
1987	G. Ainsworth Harrison	United Kingdom	"Social heterogeneity and biological variation"	18 November 1987	[80]
1988	Daniel Carleton Gajdusek	United States	"New plagues - old scourges: epidemics of brain disease in population isolates in the twentieth century"	2 November 1988	[81]
1989	Fredrik Barth	Norway	"Transmission, and the shaping of culture in Asia and Melanesia"	22 November 1989	[82]
1990	Robert Hinde	United Kingdom	"A biologist looks at anthropology"	21 November 1990	[83]
1991	Colin Renfrew	United Kingdom	"Archaeology, genetics and linguistic diversity: a new synthesis?"	27 November 1991	[84]
1992	Mary Douglas	United Kingdom	Balaam's Place in the Book of Numbers	18 November 1992	[85]
1993	George W. Stocking Jr.	United States	Reading the palimpsest of enquiry: Notes and Queries and the history of social anthropology	16 February 1993	[86]
1994	Sidney W. Mintz	United States	Enduring substances and trying theories: the Caribbean region as Oikumenê	7 December 1994	[87]
1995	Jack Goody	United Kingdom	A kernel of doubt: agnosticism in cultural and cross-cultural perspective	6 December 1995	[88]
1996	Phillip Tobias	South Africa	The ape-like Australopithecus after 70 years: was it hominid?	27 November 1996	[89]
1997	Stanley Tambiah	United States	Transnational movements, multiculturalism and ethnonationalism	18 November 1997	[90]
1998	Marshall Sahlins	United States	Two or three things that I know about culture	18 November 1998	[91]
1999	Sally Falk Moore	United States	Certainties undone: fifty turbulent years of legal anthropology, 1949-1999	27 October 1999	[92]
2000	Pierre Bourdieu	France	Participant objectivation: breaching the boundary between anthropology and sociology – how?	6 December 2000	[93]
2001	John Francis Marchment Middleton	United Kingdom	Merchants: An Essay in Historical Ethnography	14 November 2001	[94]
2002	Jane Goodall	United Kingdom	The scientific study of primates and its impact on contemporary world-views	4 December 2002	[95]
2003	Gananath Obeyesekere	United States	Cannibal talk: dialogical misunderstandings in the south seas	15 July 2003	[96]
2004	Marilyn Strathern	United Kingdom	A Community of Critics? Thoughts on New Knowledge	8 December 2004	[97]
2005	Peter Ucko	United Kingdom	Forms such as never were in nature: forging authenticity	7 December 2005	[98]
2006	Leslie Aiello	United States	Diet, energy and human evolution	7 December 2006	[99]
2007	Adam Kuper	South Africa	Changing the subject – about cousin marriage, among other thing	14 December 2007	[100]
2008	Maurice Godelier	France	Community, society, culture: three keys to understanding today’s conflicted identities	7 November 2008	[101]
2009	Ian Hodder	United Kingdom	Human-thing entanglement: towards an integrated archaeological perspective		[102]
2010	Johannes Fabian	Netherlands	Cultural anthropology and the question of knowledge	4 February 2010	[103]
2011	Bruce Kapferer	Australia	How Anthropologists Think: Refiguring the Exotic	16 December 2011	[104]
2012	Alan Macfarlane	United Kingdom	Anthropology, Empire and Modernity	14 December 2012	[105]
2013	Howard Morphy	United Kingdom	Extended Lives in Global Spaces: The Anthropology of Yolngu Pre Burial Ceremonies		[106]
2014	Tim Ingold	United Kingdom	On Human Correspondence	7 November 2014	[107]
2015	Robin Dunbar	United Kingdom	Dunbar's number(s): constraints on the social world		[108]
2016	Margaret Lock	Canada	Mutable Environments and the Permeable Human Body	11 November 2016	[109]
2017	Margaret Conkey	United States	Field Walking, Walking the Field: Anthropological Archaeology as Viewed from Deep Time		[110]
2018	Anna Tsing	United States	Feral Atlas:The More-than-Human Anthropocene	29 November 2018	[111][112]
2019	Chris Hann	United Kingdom	Economy and Ethics in the Cosmic Process	18 December 2019	[113]
2020	Stephen Levinson	United Kingdom	The ‘interaction engine’: the evolution of the infrastructure for language	14 December 2020	[114]
2021	Stephen Shennan	United Kingdom	Population and the dynamics of culture change	14 December 2021	[115]
2022	Marcia Langton	No lecture			[81]
2023	Chris Stringer	United Kingdom	Mostly Out of Africa: how, when and where	8 November 2023	[116]
2024	Alex de Waal	United Kingdom
2025	Didier Fassin