Ian Hodder: Where are we heading? The evolution of humans and things

Tuesday, October 23rd, 16–17, Ian Hodder professor of archaeology at Stanford University, give the lecture Where are we heading? The evolution of humans and things at the University of Iceland (main building).

In his lecture, Ian Hodder, will discuss the entanglement of humans and things in regard to the current theories of human evolution. Hodder will demonstrate why things matter and propose a new evolutionary model based on his theories on the ever-increasing mutual dependency between humans and things; their entanglement. It is this mutual dependency that creates the dominant trend in both cultural and genetic evolution. In the lecture, Hodder will select a small number of cases, including the invention of the wheel and cotton spinning technologies, to show how entanglement has created webs of human-thing dependency that encircle the world and limit our responses to global crises.

During the last decades, professor Ian Hodder, has been the leading scholar of theoretical archaeology world-widely. His best-known publications are Reading the Past (1994), The Archaeological Process (1999) and Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012). Hodder did also lead the archaeological excavation at Catalhoyuk in Turkey for years and his research there marked a turning point in the history of theoretical archaeology.

The lecture is based on Hodder´s latest book: Where are we heading? The entanglements of humans and things (published by Yale University Press 2018).

The event is arranged by the Department of Archaeology and the Institute of History.