Timothy Earle

Professor and Chair (Ph.D. Michigan 1973)
1812 Hinman, Room 201
(847) 491-2852
tke299@northwestern.edu

RESEARCH AND TEACHING INTERESTS: Archaeology of Complex Societies, Social Inequality, Economic Anthropology, Andes, Polynesia, and Europe.

Tim Earle is an economic anthropologist who specializes in the archaeological studies of social inequality and political leadership in early chiefdoms and states. He has conducted multi-year, international field research projects in Polynesia, Peru, Argentina, Denmark, and presently Hungary. Having studies the emergence of social complexity in three independent world regions, his work is comparative, searching for the causes of alternative pathways to centralized power. He has studied irrigation agriculture as engineered landscapes, and how land tenure translates into political control. He has also investigated the role of attached specialists, who produce weapons and wealth that are used to protect and legitimize political domination. His publications include Bronze Age Economics, The Evolution of Human Societies, How Chiefs Come to Power, Culture Matters in the Neolithic Transition and Emergence of Hierarchy. American Anthropologist 106, and Ideology, Materialization and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology 37. He has served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology, and President of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. Tim Earle is the recipient of many grants from the National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and has served on the review boards of the National Science Foundation, Annual Reviews in Anthropology, and Cambridge University Press. He has delivered the Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology to the American Anthropological Association and the Annual Keynote Address to the Society of Economic Anthropology. Presently, he studies comparatively the long-term development of political economies, emphasizing contrasts been mercantilism and intensified agricultural landscapes as it affects political power.

RECENT COURSES TAUGHT

225 - Evolution of Human Society
322 - Archaeological Research Design

341 - Economic Anthropology
401 - The Logic of Inquiry in Anthropology – Archaeology

PUBLICATIONS

Recent Books

2002 Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies.

Boulder: Westview Press.

2000 The Evolution of Human Societies: From Forager Group to Agrarian

State. Second edition. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press (with A.

Johnson)

1997 How Chiefs Come to Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Recent Articles

2008 The Engineered Landscapes of Irrigation. In Economics and the

Transformation of Landscape, L. Cliggett and C.A. Pool (eds.), pp.19-

46. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press.

2007 Eventful Archaeology: The Place of Space in Structural Transformation.

Current Anthropology 48: 833-860. (With Robin Beck, Douglas

Bolender, and James Brown).

2004 Culture Matters in the Neolithic Transition and Emergence of Heirarchy

in Thy, Denmark. American Anthropologist 106: 111-125

2001 Institutionalization of Chiefdoms: Why Landscapes are Built. In Leaders

to Rulers, ed J. Haas, pp. 105-124. New York: Kluwer

Academic/Plenum Publishers.

2001 Exchange and Social Stratification in the Andes: the Xauxa Case. In

Empire and Domestic Economy, eds. T. D’Altroy and C. Hastorf,

pp.297-314. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers.

2000 Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology

29:39-60.

1999 Production and Exchange in Prehistory. In Companion Encyclopedia of

Archaeology, ed G. Barker, pp. 608-635. London: Routledge.

1998 The Political Economy of Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Society:

the Thy Archaeological Project. Norwegian Archaeological Review 31: 1-

28. (with J. H. Bech, K. Kristiansen, P. Aperlo, K. Kelertas, and J.

Steinberg)

1996 Ideology, Materialization and Power Strategies. Current Anthropology

37:15-31 (with E. DeMarrais and L. Castillo)