Profs and Pints Online presents: “What We Did in Bed,” a look at the little-known history of the place where we spend a third of our lives, with archaeologist Brian Fagan, distinguished emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of What We Did in Bed: A Horizontal History.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access. ]

Groucho Marx once remarked: “Anything that cannot be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all.” Join archaeologist Brian Fagan online as he takes us on an entertaining journey through more than 70,000 years of our horizontal history. He’ll show you that beds have big stories to tell.

Today, because of its “private” status, the bed has been pushed into the shadows even though we spend a third of our lives there. But until the Industrial Revolution and even beyond, beds were both a pragmatic and symbolic place, a prop, as it were, for the theater of life.

We will begin our journey more than seventy millennia ago, among hunters in South Africa who dug hollows in cave floors lined with bug-resistant grass. By 3,200 BCE, farmers in the Orkney Islands slept in stone-lined beds surrounded by the burials of their ancestors. For the ancient Egyptians, the bed was a vital link to the afterlife. The pharaoh Tutankhamun was even buried with a golden bed on legs and a folding camp bed. Egyptian scribes kept records of pharaohs’ sex lives.

Beds have changed little since Tutankhamun’s day—rectangular platforms with variations: platform beds, cupboard beds, hammocks, high beds, and waterbeds. How they are used, however, has changed dramatically over time. King Louis XIV ruled France from his bed. Winston Churchill interviewed his War Cabinet in his bedroom. By Victorian times, bedchamber socializing was frowned upon, but meeting around the deathbed, epitomized by Queen Victoria’s passing, had become an important ritual.

We’ll spend the night in the Great Bed of Ware, a popular tourist attraction in Central England, where 24 butchers and their wives spent the night in 1765. We’ll join Victorian maids as they shake out their era’s beds, recount the invention of the duvet during the 1970s and the waterbed a decade later, and lie in the multitasking beds of today.

Beds are the ultimate bedtime story, far more than a place for childbirth, sex, sickness, and death. They are a mirror of life itself. Watch Dr. Fagan turn back the covers of history with this talk, with big, often bizarre tales to tell. You will never think of your bed in the same way after this unusual journey through history in the horizontal plane.

Profs & Pints Online: What We Did in Bed