Trevor Watkins retired in October 2003 but during his long association with Archaeology at Edinburgh he taught Near Eastern prehistory and protohistory. His research interests covered the beginnings of village-type communities in the Near East, and the economic transformation of early agriculture. Now his work on this subject has taken a cognitive approach, as he has become concerned to understand the implications of beginning to live in settled communities that create their own architectural and social environment.
He has translated Jacques Cauvin's book The Birth of the Gods, the Beginnings of Agriculture for Cambridge University Press (published July 2000), and has written his own synthesis on the beginnings of village life and the origins of agriculture, which is shortly to be published by Routledge.
As a fore-taste of a new, cognitive approach to the beginning of the neolithic, pre-prints of four recent conference papers are available here.
He has directed field research projects in Syria, Cyprus and Iraq. Most recently, he has been engaged in a project at Pinarbasi, a cluster of hunter-gatherer and early farming sites near Çatalhöyük in south-central Turkey. There is a list of fieldwork and other research programmes that he has directed.
He also works on the early urban and state-level societies of the Near East and their prehistoric predecessors, being particularly interested in the social and economic aspects of the production and use of metals.
There is also a list of his publications.
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