Ian R. Hodder (born 23 November, 1948 in Bristol) is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology. As of 2005, he is Dunlevie Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University in the United States.
Hodder's fieldwork most famously involves excavating of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in the central Anatolia (modern Turkey): he is Director of the Çatalhöyük Archaeological Project which aims to conserve the site, put it into context, and present it to the public. He has endeavoured to explore the effects of non-positivistic approaches on method in archaeology which includes providing each excavator with the opportunity to record his or her own individual interpretation of the site.
He obtained a first class Bachelor of Arts degree in Prehistoric Archaology from London University in 1971, and a PhD on "spatial analysis in archaeology" at Cambridge University in 1975. He was a lecturer at the University of Leeds from 1974 to 1977 before moving back to Cambridge, eventually becoming Professor of Archaeology in 1996. He moved to Stanford in 1999, and became Dunlevie Family Professor in 2002. He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996.
Publications
- Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976, with C. Orton)
- Symbols in action. Ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture (1982)
- The Present Past. An introduction to anthropology for archaeologists (1982)
- Reading the Past. Current approaches to interpretation in archaeology (1986) (revised 1991 and, with Scott Huston, 2003)
- The Domestication of Europe: structure and contingency in Neolithic societies (1990)
- Theory and Practice in Archaeology (1992) (Collected papers)
- On the Surface: Çatalhöyük 1993-95 (1996) As editor, Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara. ISBN 0951942034.
- The Archaeological Process. An introduction (1999)
- Archaeology beyond dialogue (2004) (Collected papers)
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