# Huxley Memorial Medal and 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. The lecture and medal are awarded annually to any scientist who distinguishes themselves in any field of anthropological research. 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.
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, 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.

## Recipients

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