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Books by Ian Hodder

This book, published only online, explores further the entanglements between humans and things. I... more This book, published only online, explores further the entanglements between humans and things. It contains theoretical and methodological developments including a redefinition of human-thing entanglement and the application of formal network analysis. The book also contains a series of case-studies regarding the formation of settled life in the Middle East, the adoption of agriculture, and the study of power and poverty, creativity and religion. The book ends with a critical dialogue regarding the issues raised by studies of entanglement.

Papers by Ian Hodder

by Marcio Teixeira-Bastos, Ian Hodder, Hannah Moots, Sophia Colello, Koji Lau-Ozawa, Lúcio Menezes Ferreira, Michael V Wilcox, Allison Mickel, Ciler Cilingiroglu, Anna Källén, Wendy Teeter, Tiffany C . Fryer, Piraye Hacıgüzeller, Supriya Varma, Swadhin Sen, Veerasamy Selvakumar, Rebecca Graff, Natalia Pulyavina, Anne Sherfield, Tânia Manuel Casimiro, Francisco Curate, Marianne Sallum, Alessandra Cianciosi, Lucy Gill, Alice Kehoe, Matthew Greer, and Kristina G Douglass

In light of the ongoing acts of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence that testify to the immed... more In light of the ongoing acts of anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence that testify to the immediate need for systemic social change, the new TAG 2021 theme will focus on issues of social and racial justice in the theory, method, and practice of archaeology.

Revista de Arqueologia (SAB), 2020

RESUMO Trata-se de um diálogo com Ian Hodder sobre a virada ontológica em arqueologia. Debate-se ... more RESUMO Trata-se de um diálogo com Ian Hodder sobre a virada ontológica em arqueologia. Debate-se sobre sua teoria sobre o Emaranhado Humano-Coisas e suas implicações sobre diversos temas: relações da arqueologia com outras ciências; agência das coisas; agência humana; poder; antropoceno e capitoloceno.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

Over recent decades, many archaeologists have eschewed evolutionary theories, and in doing so the... more Over recent decades, many archaeologists have eschewed evolutionary theories, and in doing so they have turned away from the identification of long-term trends that are of great relevance to present-day matters of concern. In particular, there is clear evidence for an overall long-term increase in the amount of human-made material and associated human-thing entanglements, an increase tied up with environmental impact and global inequalities. The directionality of these long-term changes is clear and yet evolutionary theory largely shuns notions of overall directional change. This paradox and its implications are the subject of this article, with the suggestion made that, for human evolution at least, notions of directionality and path dependence need to be embraced, with concomitant changes in human evolutionary theory, and with implications for responses to environmental change. Adding to earlier accounts of entanglement, emphases are placed on the self-amplifying processes that lead to change and on irreversibility in the place of teleology.

This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the adoption of farming and ... more This paper argues that the search for an overarching explanation for the
adoption of farming and settled life in the Middle East can be enhanced by a consideration of the dependencies between humans and human-made things from the Late Glacial Maximum onwards. Often not considered in discussions of the origins of agriculture is the long process of human tooth size reduction that started in the Upper
Palaeolithic and can reasonably be related to the increased use of grinding stones that created softer and more nutrient-rich plant foods. A consideration of the use of groundstone tools through the Epipalaeolithic and into the Neolithic shows that they were entangled with hearths, ovens, houses and settlements, exchange relations and notions of ownership. The practicalities of processing plants drew humans into pathways that led to intensification, population increase, sedentism and domestication. Much the same can be said for other human-made things such as sickles, storage bins, domestic animal dung and refuse. The dialectical tensions between human-thing dependence and dependency generated the movement towards Neolithicization. Human-thing dependence (involving human dependence on things, thing dependence
on humans and thing dependence on other things) afforded opportunities towards which humans (always already in a given state of entanglement) were drawn in order to solve problems. But this dependence also involved dependency, limitation and constraint, leading for example to increases in labour. In order to provide that labour
or in other ways to deal with the demands of things and their entanglements with other humans and things, humans made further use of the affordances of things. There was thus a generative spiral leading to sedentism and domestication.

Abstract This article explores the extent to which formal network analysis can be used to study a... more Abstract This article explores the extent to which formal network analysis can be used
to study aspects of entanglement, the latter referring to the collective sets of dependencies
between humans and things. The data used were derived from the Neolithic sites of
Boncuklu and Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The first part of the analysis involves
using formal network methods to chart the changing interactions between humans and
things at these sites through time. The values of betweenness and centrality vary
through time in ways that illuminate the known transformations at the site as, for
example, domestic cattle are introduced. The ego networks for houses across four time
periods at the two sites are also patterned in ways that contribute to an understanding of
social and economic trends. In a second set of analyses, formal network methods are
applied to intersecting operational chains, or chainworks. Finally, the dependencies
between humans and things are evaluated by exploring the costs and benefits of
particular material choices relative to larger entanglements. In conclusion, it is argued
that three types of entanglement can be represented and explored using methods taken
from the network sciences. The first type concerns the large number of relations that
surround any particular human or thing. The second concerns the ways in which
entanglements are organized. The third type of entanglement concerns the dialectic
between dependence (potential through reliance) and dependency (constraint through
reliance).

In a recent article in this journal, Carleton et al (2013) cast doubt on a hypothesis about the s... more In a recent article in this journal, Carleton et al (2013) cast doubt on a hypothesis about the social organization of the Neolithic tell site of Çatalhöyük in central Turkey. The hypothesis concerns ‘history houses’ that were continually built in the same place and in which many interments occurred. Carleton et al argue that the history house hypothesis ‘contends that the corporate kin-group was the main form of socioeconomic organization at Çatalhöyük during the PPNB, and that the corporate kin-groups would have been maintained by the repeated rebuilding of houses in the same place and by the burial of important members under the floors of the houses’ (Carleton et al 2013, 1821). They test the history house hypothesis by examining the relationship between continuity of houses and the percentage of houses that contain burial. The purpose of this response is to (a) clarify the hypothesis, (b) show that the claimed test does not test the hypothesis, and (c) demonstrate that poor and out-of-date data were used. Data are presented that go some way to confirm a link between ‘history houses’ and burial at Çatalhöyük and reinforce wider scholarly discussion of Neolithic history and memory making.

Anthropological Quarterly 76.1: 55-69

There have recently been a number of attempts to develop reflexive field methods in

The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eigh... more The domestication of cattle, sheep and goats had already taken place in the Near East by the eighth millennium BC 1-3 . Although there would have been considerable economic and nutritional gains from using these animals for their milk and other products from living animals-that is, traction and wool-the first clear evidence for these appears much later, from the late fifth and fourth millennia BC 4,5 . Hence, the timing and region in which milking was first practised remain unknown. Organic residues preserved in archaeological pottery 6,7 have provided direct evidence for the use of milk in the fourth millennium in Britain 7-9 , and in the sixth millennium in eastern Europe 10 , based on the d 13 C values of the major fatty acids of milk fat 6,7 . Here we apply this approach to more than 2,200 pottery vessels from sites in the Near East and southeastern Europe dating from the fifth to the seventh millennia BC. We show that milk was in use by the seventh millennium; this is the earliest direct evidence to date. Milking was particularly important in northwestern Anatolia, pointing to regional differences linked with conditions more favourable to cattle compared to other regions, where sheep and goats were relatively common and milk use less important. The latter is supported by correlations between the fat type and animal bone evidence.

Revista de Arqueologia (SAB), 2020

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

Anthropological Quarterly 76.1: 55-69

There have recently been a number of attempts to develop reflexive field methods in

This paper explores debates concerning the relationships between self or personhood and the objec... more This paper explores debates concerning the relationships between self or personhood and the object world. Archaeologists can demonstrate transformations in self and personhood related to major social and economic changes in prehistory and history. This paper focuses in particular on transformations in self and personhood related to the emergence of farming and settled life. It uses evidence from Çatalhöyük, a 9000-year old town in central Turkey, that this early time period sees the emergence of new forms of agency, as well as changed notions of self and personhood. The latter are themselves tied up in the new materialities and modes of life that emerged as people settled down and moulded identities in stable houses, plastered forms and longer-term social entanglements.

This paper responds to that aspect of Andrew Sherratt's writings that argued for building specifi... more This paper responds to that aspect of Andrew Sherratt's writings that argued for building specifically archaeological theory. In describing a theory of entanglement, I have focused on the archaeological sensitivity to the complexities and practical interlacings of material things. The theory argues that human-thing entanglement comes about as a result of the dialectic between dependence (the reliance of humans and things on each other) and dependency (a constraining and limiting need of humans for things). Andrew's discussion of the role of the wheel in his Secondary Products Revolution is a good example of how humans and things have become entangled so that, over the long term, we have been channeled down particular evolutionary pathways.

O ver recent decades there has been widespread recognition in the social sciences and humanities ... more O ver recent decades there has been widespread recognition in the social sciences and humanities of a "return to things," 1 in contrast to the earlier focus on representation, and in contrast to the long scholarly tradition that separated subject from object, mind from matter. For example, the scholar of American literature Bill Brown has called for a "thing theory," 2 while the philosopher Don Ihde's "material hermeneutics" denies the opposition between positivism and hermeneutics and explores ways in which technologies and machines shape the way we do science and see the world. 3 A similar point regarding the history of science has been made by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their work on the air pump used in experiments by Boyle. 4 Like the microscope and the telescope, the pump allowed new things to be seen. Numerous different perspectives, from Actor-Network Theory to anthropological accounts of materiality and the buildup of "stuff" in our contemporary lives to discussions of the agency, vibrancy, and vitality of mute things, have converged on some version of the idea that subject and object, mind and matter, human and thing co-constitute each other. 5 In these different approaches it is accepted that human existence and social life depend on material things and are entangled with them; humans and things are relationally produced.

A new radiocarbon dating program, conceived at the outset within a Bayesian statistical framework... more A new radiocarbon dating program, conceived at the outset within a Bayesian statistical framework, has recently been applied to the earliest levels of occupation on the Neolithic East Mound at Ç atalhöyük in central Turkey. Ç atalhöyük was excavated by James Mellaart from 1961 to 1965 and new excavations directed by Ian Hodder started in 1993. In 2012 the site was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. However, the precise dating of the site has remained insecure, bracketed somewhere between the late eighth and the early sixth millennium BC calibrated. In a new dating program reported on here, dates previously obtained from the site have been allied with new dates to produce a series of models that could be evaluated statistically and in relation to taphonomic considerations. The preferred model puts the earliest excavated layers at Ç atalhöyük 200 years later than previously thought. The implications of this later dating for local continuity and for the spread of pottery are discussed.

I take it for granted that archaeological stewardship should be based on dialogue between stakeho... more I take it for granted that archaeological stewardship should be based on dialogue between stakeholder groups. Some form of collaboration and consultation is at the heart of most attempts today to deal with long-term stewardship issues, whether it is the consultancy involved in the development of the Stonehenge management plan or the dialogues involving archaeologists, governments, and indigenous peoples throughout the world (e.g., . I also take it for granted that many guidelines and procedures have been discussed for such stewardship collaboration dealing with a wide range of issues, including the need to identify all potential stakeholders, provide time for consultation, evaluate varying cultural values regarding heritage, and assess economic implications (e.g., de la Torre 1997). U n c o r r e c t e d P r o o f

This paper argues that it is possible to develop a non-biological evolutionary selectionist posit... more This paper argues that it is possible to develop a non-biological evolutionary selectionist position based on the ideas of entanglement and fittingness. Entanglement is defined as the sum of four relations of dependence: human dependence on things, things on things, things on humans, and humans on humans. It can also be defined as the dialectic of dependence and dependency. Fittingness derives from the ways in which humans and things afford each other in relation to abstractions and embodied feelings about what is appropriate. In order to illustrate and clarify the theoretical approach, the example is provided of long-term change of cultural traits at Çatalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old Neolithic village in central Turkey. The increases and decreases at the site of cooking pottery, clay balls, house size and sandy bricks are interpreted in terms of changing entanglements, fittingness and contingent interactions.

This paper summarises and interprets data from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük East collected be... more This paper summarises and interprets data from the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük East collected between 2000 and 2008, while at the same time integrating data from earlier and more recent excavation seasons. The paper focuses on evidence for change during the occupation of the site, arguing for an increase in the size and density of occupation into the middle levels associated with symbolic and ritual elaboration within an aggressively egalitarian community. The middle 'classic' levels at Çatalhöyük were associated with increased workload, physical stresses and illness. The pressures were relieved in the upper levels after 6500 BC by shifts to greater mobility, increased economic independence of houses and dispersal of population. This shift in the upper levels may be of relevance to the spread of farming populations into northwestern Anatolia and Europe.

The protection of cultural heritage sites is normally evaluated in terms of universal and scholar... more The protection of cultural heritage sites is normally evaluated in terms of universal and scholarly significance criteria, although increasingly the contributions of sites and monuments to the economic and social well-being of communities have been recognized. Human rights discourse, despite its many problems and limitations, offers a possible mechanism for evaluating heritage in terms of social justice and well-being. A cultural heritage right based on descent is particularly problematic and cannot be supported by archaeological, historical, and anthropological theories. A cultural heritage right based on whether people are in practice able to participate in sites and objects in such a way as to fulfill their capabilities is an alternative, as long as it also includes responsibilities to other communities with conflicting interests. However, few archaeologists and heritage managers have the training and expertise to work out short-and long-term economic and social benefits of artifacts, sites, and monuments, and they have limited experience in facilitating human capabili-