Royal Anthropological Institute & Institute of Archaeology University College London
Cycles of Theory:
a critical review of 60 years
of archaeological theory and practice
6-7th June 2025
This is a two-part in-Person event.
Please sign up for each part individually.
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Register here (link to be added) for Friday 6 June 4.15 – 6.30pm: Opening Discussion
Register here (link to be added) for Saturday 7 June 10am-6:30pm: One-day conference
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Please also note that while there is no conference fee, £25 is requested
upon registration for the second day to cover teas and coffees, and a simple lunch box.
Numbers are limited. Early registration is encouraged to avoid disappointment.
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The aim of this event, which marks the lifetime achievement award of the Royal Anthropological Institute to Professor Ian Hodder, is to follow the arc of archaeological theory over the last 60 years.
Some of the key questions raised are whether new insights have been achieved or simply the reworking of the same themes in new guises.
Have the changes just followed wider trends in the social sciences or has a distinctively archaeological take been contributed? The arc of archaeological theory might be seen to have a recurring direction. For example early postprocessual archaeology often had a materialist bent – what are the implications of the retreat from materialism to materiality and back again? There is also a return today to grand narrative and big data; process and relationality have been recurring themes. Have we just been spiraling around old problems or has there been a directional achievement that is distinctively archaeological?
Friday 6th June 4.15 – 6.30pm
Opening discussion initiated by Andrew Bauer, Paul Lane and Rachel King on potential examples of cycles, recurrences and repetitions in archaeological theory. Examples might include the focus on process in processual, postprocessual and process archaeology, the links between ontology, world view and cosmology, the relations between relationality and contextuality, materialism and materiality, or even the resonances between material engagement/correspondence and ‘man makes himself’.
Saturday 7th June 10.15am – 6.30pm
| 10.15am | Welcome and opening |
| 10.30am | Matthew Spriggs (ANU) ’40 years since Marxist Perspectives in Archaeology: Back to the future?’ |
| 11.00am | Andrew Bauer (Stanford) ‘Science, Seance, and the Politics of Archaeological Knowledge: The Relevance of Processual vs. Post-Processual Debates for Contemporary Archaeology’ |
| 11.30am | Coffee |
| 12.00pm | Chris Evans (Cambridge) ‘’Time in Land: Wetland Hermeneutics at Haddenham and Over’. |
| 12.30pm | Amy Bogaard (Oxford) ‘Domestication, hospitality and the domus’. |
| 1.00pm | Lunch |
| 2.00pm | Julian Thomas (Manchester) The shift to interpretation beyond text |
| 2.30pm | Allison Mickel (Lehigh) Who we keep in the loop: cycles of collaborative archaeology |
| 3.00pm | Güneş Duru (Mimar Sinan) ‘Against the Tide: Çatalhöyük in Context’ |
| 3.30pm | Tea |
| 4.00pm | Oliver Harris (Leicester) ‘ Concepts which make worlds: on context, relations and archaeological theory’ |
| 4.30pm | Christopher Witmore (Texas Tech) ‘Tangled in the Thickets of Theory? Between object-oriented approaches and entanglement’. |
| 5.00pm | Response and Commentary: Ian Hodder (Koç), Bob Preucel (Brown), Mike Parker Pearson (UCL) |
| 6.30pm | End |
