40 Years of Theoretical Engagement: A Conversation with Ian Hodder

Abstract

Ian Hodder was born in Bristol, England, in 1948. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in prehistoric archaeology from the University of London in 1971, and his PhD from Cambridge University in 1975. He was a lecturer at the University of Leeds from 1974 to 1977, after which he returned to Cambridge where he worked as lecturer, reader and finally professor from 1996 to 1999. He has also been visiting professor at the Van Giffen Institute of Amsterdam, the Sorbonne in Paris, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of California at Berkeley. He began his current position as Dunlevie Family Professor, Chair of the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology and then Director of the Archaeology Center at Stanford University in 1999. Ian Hodder is the pioneer of post‐processual archaeology, which was developed in his own and his students' works during the early 1980s. For the last three decades his reasonings have had a very important impact on the discipline's theoretical discourses and on archaeological interpretations more generally. His fieldwork – where some of his theoretical and methodological principles are put to practice – includes excavations at the famous 9,000 year‐old Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in central Anatolia/Turkey. He is the author of numerous seminal books including Symbols in Action (1982a), Reading the Past (1986), The Domestication of Europe (1990), The Archaeological Process (1999) and The Leopard's Tale (2006).

The conversation took place as an e‐mail dialogue between Ian Hodder and NAR editors Håkan Karlsson and Bjørnar Olsen during spring and autumn 2007. It was completed in March 2008.