HODDER’S PLACE IN ARCHAEOLOGY
Ian Hodder is an important archaeological voice on the cognitive thought processes of Neolithic humans, processes that can be compared to religious thought - or at least as contributing to its formation.
Hodder himself has refused requests to write contributions on the specific subject of religion for more than a decade (including for this volume), and has until recently never taken a clear stand on religion as such. However, more recently (2010), a volume appeared with religion as the focus. In this section we try to identify what we consider to be the relevant aspects of his thought from previously published sources but have also added in some bits on Hodder (2010a).Hodder studied at the Institute of Archaeology in London before going to Cambridge where he completed his studies and taught, eventually ending up in Stanford where he is now Professor. Since 1993 he has directed the resumed archaeological excavations at Qatal Hdyiik (an Anatolian village in the eighthsixth millennia BCE), begun by James Mellaart in the 1960s. The finds from Qatal Hdyiik were neglected in the era when archaeology was dominated by approaches stressing “systems” and “functionality” whereas Mellaart had declared at the time that the discoveries were clearly incompatible with that paradigm. It was only later - with the support and influence of Hodder - that broader interpretations became acceptable.
Hodder’s original base was the European Neolithic. With his work at Qatal Hdyiik he has developed an original analysis of how the Neolithic came about. His theoretical and methodological “post-processual school” (consciously modelled on post-modernism and post-structuralism) was initiated in the 1980s when similar (but less spectacular and programmatic) reflections were likewise awakened in Scandinavia (see Nordbladh, this volume, Ch. 3). The idea was a response to the rigorous positivism and exclusive focus on quantifiable models advocated by what he termed “processualism” (which had hitherto been one of the dominant trends in the “New Archaeology”). The basis of post-processualism is the (re-)introduction of the study of “meaning” in archaeology (which had played a part since the nineteenth century), assuming that (a) all human action is meaningfully structured, (b) material culture is meaningfully structured, and (c) that it is possible for archaeologists to interpret this meaning.
Thus, post- processualism opened the way for a wave of symbolic studies through the 1990s and 2000s. Whereas “symbol” is not the same as “religion”, religions do build upon symbols. As a consequence, the archaeological interpretation of religion has seen a renaissance with post-processualism.The titles of books such as Symbols in Action (1982), Reading the Past (1986), The Meanings of Things (1989) testify to the approach that was initially influenced by literary and philosophical methodology, particularly structuralism and Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. Later, Hodder and his most theoretical post- processualist colleagues settled for the hypothesis that material culture cannot be “read” as a text and therefore cannot be analysed and interpreted with literary methods. They now recognize that material culture behaves differently - meaning that according to their current view meanings are more stable in material than in texts - and it therefore requires a particular methodology for its interpretation. Yet, literary methodology still seems to have contributed (fruitfully) to this new methodology, as when “the removal of human heads is referred to in several wall paintings” (Hodder & Meskell 2010: 53; our emphasis), a formulation we could call intermateriality, or when rudimentary figurines are referred to as “abbreviations” (Hodder & Meskell 2010: 61) and thus inserted into an optic where “figurine” is paralleled to a linguistic sign.