Ian Hodder

Ian Richard Hodder CMG FBA (born 23 November 1948 in Bristol) is a British archaeologist and pioneer of postprocessualist theory in archaeology that first took root among his students and in his own work between 1980–1990.[1] At this time he had such students as Henrietta Moore, Ajay Pratap, Nandini Rao, Mike Parker Pearson, Paul Lane, John Muke, Sheena Crawford, Nick Merriman, Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley. As of 2002, he is Dunlevie Family Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University in the United States.[2]

Since 1993, Hodder and an international team of archaeologists have carried out new research and excavation of the 9,000-year-old Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in 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 methods in archaeology, which includes providing each excavator with the opportunity to record his or her own individual interpretation of the site.

He obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree with First-Class Honors in Prehistoric Archaeology from the University of London in 1971, and a PhD on "spatial analysis in archaeology" at the University of Cambridge in 1974. He was a lecturer at the University of Leeds from 1974 to 1977 before moving back to Cambridge, where he held several academic positions, including Professor of Archaeology from 1996 to 1999. He moved to Stanford in 1999 and became Dunlevie Family Professor in 2002, and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1996.[2] He received an award on the Queen's 2019 Birthday Honours List for his services to archaeology and UK/Turkey relations.