Cycles of Theory: a critical review of 60 years of archaeological theory and practice (Friday Opening Discussion)

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 at UCL Institute of Archaeology, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PY

This is a two-part in-Person event. Each part must be booked separately.

This registration is for the  Opening Discussion on Friday 6 June.
Location: Room 612 (Sixth Floor)

If you wish to book the  one day conference on  Saturday 7 June, go here.

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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?

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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’.