Barbara Bender

Barbara Bender
Academic work
InstitutionsUCL

Barbara Bender is an anthropologist and archaeologist. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Heritage Anthropology at University College London.

Career

Bender studied for a PhD on the Neolithic of Northern France at the Institute of Archaeology, London. From 1967-68 she was assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In 1972 Bender was a Lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University. Her first monograph Farming in Prehistory, published in 1975, was described as a 'painstaking compilation' of archaeological evidence on the development of agriculture.

Later she moved to the Department of Anthropology, UCL, being one of several material-culture focused anthropologists within the department in the late 1970s and early 1980s alongside Daniel Miller and John Gledhill. Bender's later work utilised a phenomenological approach to landscape, collaborating with Sue Hamilton and Christopher Tilley. In the late 1990s, Bender, Hamilton and Tilley developed a landscape research project, with the support of UCL students, that focused on the Bronze Age settlement and stone circle at Leskernick on Bodmin Moor. Bender's study of Stonehenge is considered a seminal work in considering archaeological sites as historically dynamic, with numerous stakeholders.

Additional information

Barbara has been involved with the Branscombe Project in Devon where she lives since it started in 1992 writing under her married name, Farquharson. Jan Farquharson her husband died 2001. Her 2023/6 book, The Burnt House at Weston, Branscombe, published by the Branscombe Project was written with her late partner the historian, John Torrance, d. 2021.

Selected publications

References

  1. ↑ "Prof Barbara Bender". Retrieved 20 December 2018.
  2. ↑ Bender, B (2002). "Time and Landscape". Current Anthropology. 43: S103–S112. doi:10.1086/339561. S2CID 142703033.
  3. 1 2 Bender, Barbara; Phillips, Patricia (1972). "The early farmers of France". Antiquity. 46 (182): 97–105. doi:10.1017/s0003598x00053333. ISSN 0003-598X. S2CID 162609426.
  4. ↑ Higgs, E. S. (1976). "Barbara Bender: Farming in prehistory. London: John Baker, 1975. 255 pp., 5 pls., 36 figs. £5.50". Antiquity. 50 (198): 164–165. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00071015. ISSN 1745-1744. S2CID 161380843.
  5. ↑ Basu, P. (2013). "Material culture: ancestries and trajectories in material culture studies". In Carrier, J.G.; Gewertz, D.B. (eds.). The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology. London: Bloomsbury. pp. 370–390.
  6. ↑ Hamilton, S., Tilley, C. and Bender, B. 1999. Bronze Age stone worlds of Bodmin Moor: excavating Leskernick. Archaeology International 3: 13–17.
  7. ↑ Bender, B, Hamilton, S., and Tilley, C. 1997. Leskernick: Stone worlds, alternative narratives, nested landscapes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63: 147-178.
  8. ↑ Angelo, Dante (2014), "Public Archaeology, The Move Towards", Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, Springer, New York, NY, pp. 6181–6188, doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1015, ISBN 978-1-4419-0426-3
  9. ↑ Farquharson & Torrance, Barbara & John (2026). The Burnt House at Weston, Branscombe. Devon: Branscombe Project. pp. 217–218.