Barbara Bender is an anthropologist and archaeologist. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Heritage Anthropology at University College London.^[1]

Career

Bender studied for a PhD on the Neolithic of Northern France at the Institute of Archaeology, London.^[2] From 1967-68 she was assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago.^[3] In 1972 Bender was a Lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of London University.^[3] Her first monograph Farming in Prehistory, published in 1975, was described as a 'painstaking compilation' of archaeological evidence on the development of agriculture.^[4]

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.^[5] 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.^[6][7] Bender's study of Stonehenge is considered a seminal work in considering archaeological sites as historically dynamic, with numerous stakeholders.^[8]

Selected publications

• Bender, B. and Phillips, P. 1972. The early farmers of France. Antiquity 46(182): 97-105.
• Bender, B. 1975. Farming in Prehistory - from Hunter-Gatherer to Food Producer. London: John Baker.
• Goodall, V.M. and Bender, B. 1975. The Quest for Man. London: Phaidon.
• Bender, B. 1978. Gatherer‐hunter to farmer: A social perspective. World Archaeology 10(2): 204-222.
• Bender, B. 1985. Emergent tribal formations in the American Midcontinent. American Antiquity 50 (1): 52-62.
• Bender, B. 1986. The Archaeology of Brittany, Normandy, and the Channel Islands. London: Faber and Faber.
• Gledhill, J., Bender, B., and Larsen, M.T. 1988. State and Society: the Emergence and Development of Social Hierarchy and Political Centralization. London: Unwin Hyman.
• Bender, B. 1989. towards a theory of social evolution - on State systems and ideological shells. In Miller, D., Rowlands, M.J. and Tilley, C.Y. Domination and Resistance. London: Unwin Hyman.
• Bender, B. 1992. Theorising Landscapes, and the Prehistoric Landscapes of Stonehenge. Man, 27(4), new series, 735-755. doi:10.2307/2804172
• Bender, B. and Edmonds, M. 1992. Stonehenge: whose past? What past? Tourism Management 13(4): 355-357.
• Bender, B. 1993 (ed.) Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Oxford: Berg.
• Bender, B, Hamilton, S., and Tilley, C. 1997. Leskernick: Stone worlds, alternative narratives, nested landscapes. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 63: 147-178.
• Bender, B. 1998. Stonehenge: Making Space. Oxford: Berg.
• Hamilton, S., Tilley, C. and Bender, B. 1999. Bronze Age stone worlds of Bodmin Moor: excavating Leskernick. Archaeology International 3: 13–17.
• Bender, B. 2000. ‘Investigating Landscape and Identity in the Neolithic’, in A. Ritchie (ed.) Neolithic Orkney in its European Context, pp. 223–230. Cambridge: McDonald Institute Monographs.
• Bender, B. 2001. Landscapes on-the-move. Journal of Social Anthropology 1(1): 75-89.
• Bender, B. and Winer, M. (eds) 2001. Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Oxford: Berg.
• Bender, B. 2002. Time and landscape. Current Anthropology 43: S103-S112.
• Tilley, C., Hamilton, S., Bender, B. 2003. Art and re-presentation of the past. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 6(1): 35-62.
• Hamilton, S., Harrison, S., and Bender, B. 2008. "Conflicting Imaginations: Archaeology, Anthropology and Geomorphology on Leskernick Hill, Bodmin Moor, Southwest Britain." Geoforum 39 (2): 602-15.
• Bender, B., Hamilton, S., and Tilley, C. 2016. Stone Worlds: Narrative and Reflexivity in Landscape Archaeology. London: Routledge.