In an interview on Archaeology

Your next book represented the beginning of a new, 'post-processual' approach. Can you tell us about Ian Hodder and the importance of "Reading the Past"?

"Reading the Past" was first published in 1986 and became very popular and influential. All archaeological students read it. Post processual archaeology is very much to do with the application of postmodernism to archaeological thought and the study of the past. Its an untidy bag of ideas, including neo-Marxism, the thought that there could be such a thing as feminist archaeology, cognitive archaeology, contextual archaeology, etc. But the most striking thing is that it is relativistic, Archaeologists are asking themselves, ‘who do we think we are? Why do we think that we, mostly American and European, largely white, male archaeologists, have the right to lay down the law and say that this is significant and this isn’t? Why should we assume that we own the past, because we have degrees in archaeology? Let’s listen to some other perspectives’.

Ian Hodder is the most famous exponent of this approach. He's associated with an amazing site in Turkey, Catalhöyük. This site is a kind of Mecca for younger archaeologists, and has been for many years now. It’s an extraordinary site, a huge mound of houses built upon houses, but it is also a place where Hodder tries to ensure that almost all interpretations are worth considering. He argued that any excavator has the right to say what he or she thinks the object they have found means, and that view is no more or less valid than anyone elses.

That went further to say that even people who were traditionally viewed as a kind of nuisance by archaeologists, for example, people who think that the story of archaeology is the story of the overthrowing of matriarchy by male invasion conquest and suppression, or are searching for the remains of a lost race of lizard rulers should be granted access and be allowed to produce their own theories. Eventually you have people coming to dig trenches, but also to lay wreathes, cast spells and all kinds of things. So Catalhöyük is a centre of all kinds of superstitious, amazing and some might say irrational belief structures.