Ian Hodder has exhibited remarkable involvement in the fields of anthropological and archaeological research during the course of his career. He was born in 1949. His educational background includes a Bachelor of Arts Degree from the University of London in 1971, and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1975 where he has been a professor since 1977. He is currently on a study leave, and since 1993 Ian Hodder has been the Project Director of the Catalhoyuk archaeological research and excavation efforts in Turkey. Hodder plans to continue working at the significant Turkish site for nineteen more years until he retires.
Throughout the last few decades Ian Hodder has also been immersed in research interests such as Neolithic Europe, Ethno archaeology, archaeological theory, and symbolic and structural archaeology. Dr. Hodder has also directed long-term field projects in Britain, is Fellow of the British Academy, and has been a varsity professor at Van Giffen Institute of Amsterdam, Sorbonene in Paris, SUNY of Binghamton, and in California at Stanford University’s Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, and at the University of California at Berkeley. Physically, he has been described as a tall, slender, blond haired man of fifty with a youthful appearance.
Ian Hodder is a proponent of the technological advances our contemporary societies have come to depend upon. He feels that there is potential in the use of the Internet by researchers for storage and organization of archaeological information. Hodder also has a postmodern archaeological approach to his work, that emphasizes artifacts and clues to reveal what people in the past were thinking. It regards all cultures as having different voices and perspectives that aren’t simply the Western one. One of the archaeological characteristics of Ian Hodder is that he is a slow digger. This is not to say that he is inexperienced, but he feels that the painstakingly thorough collection and analyses of data will provide richer interpretations of the sites he excavates.
When Hodder is not busy with field projects, or lecturers at the University of Cambridge he finds the time to write informative, archaeological books. In the past couple of decades he has written books such as Symbols in Action (1982), The Present Past (1982), Reading the Past (1986), The Domestication of Europe (1990), and Theory and Practice in Archaeology (1992). Surely the next couple of decades until Ian Hodder retires will yield more insightful contributions to our understanding of past cultures and the artifacts they left behind.
“The David Skomp Distinguished Lecturers in Archaeology.” Former Link, http://www.indiana.edu/~anthro/sklect.html (October 2006) 18 Feb 2000.
“University of Cambridge Department of Archaeology.” http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/ih13/
“Archaeology and Global Information Systems.” http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue6/hodder/index.html 8 Mar 1999.
Written by: Paul Munson