Present Past: An Introduction to Anthropology for Archaeologists

This updated edition of Professor Ian Hodder’s original and classic work on the role which anthropology must play in the interpretation of the archaeological record.

There has long been a need for archaeologists and anthropologists to correlate their ideas and methods for interpreting the material culture of past civilizations. Archaeological interpretation of the past is inevitably based on the ideas and experiences of the present and the use of such ethnographic analogy has been widely adapted – and criticized, not least in Britain.

In this challenging study, Ian Hodder questions the assumptions, values and methods, which have been too readily accepted. At the same time, he shows how anthropology can be applied to archaeology. He examines the criteria for the proper use of analogy and, in particular, emphasizes the need to consider the meaning and interpretation of material cultures within the total social and cultural contexts. He discusses anthropological models of refuse deposits, technology and production, subsistence, settlement, burial, trade exchange, art form and ritual; he then considers their application to comparable archaeological data.

Throughout, Professor Hodder emphasizes the need for a truly scientific approach and a critical self-awareness by archaeologists, who should be prepared to study their own social and cultural context, not least their own attitudes to the present-day material world.

Professor Ian Hodder is a Bristol born British archaeologist who was a pioneer of post-processual archaeology, emphasising the subjectivity of archaeological interpretations, an approach which heavily influenced both his students and his own work during the 1980's. Hodder's students included some large names within archaeology, such as Mike Parker Pearson, Sheena Crawford, Christopher Tilley, Henrietta Moore and Nick Merriman. Ian Hodder now works in the US where archaeology and anthropology hold a much closer relationship. He has held his position in the department of Social and Cultural Anthropology since 1999 at Stanford University.