Faculty Member

Thomas C. Patterson
(Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, Ph.D. 1964 University of California Berkeley)
Office: 1340 Watkins Hall
Phone: (951) 827-2050
E-mail: thomas.patterson@ucr.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Professor Patterson joined the UCR Department of Anthropology in 2000. He conducted archaeological and ethnohistorical research in Peru during the 1960s. Since the 1970s, he has studied complex organizations in the United States. His current research focuses on the historical development of anthropology and archaeology in the political-economic, social and cultural contexts shaped by nation-states, especially the United States, Peru, and Mexico; critical analyses of contemporary trends in social and cultural theory; comparative political economy; class and state formation; the intersection of class, race, and gender; theories of change and development, especially the political-economic, social and cultural changes associated with imperialism and the processes of globalization; and critical investigations of how the realities of past societies are constituted and appropriated into the fabric of everyday life today.

Selected Publications: “The Turn to Agency: Neoliberalism, Individuality, and Subjectivity in Late Twentieth-Century Anglophone Archaeology” (Rethinking Marxism, 2005); “Craft Specialization, the Reorganization of Production Relations, and State Formation” (Journal of Social Archaeology 2005); The Foundations of Social Archaeology: Selected Writings of V. Gordon Childe (co-edited with Charles E. Orser, Jr. 2005); The Theory and Practice of Archaeology: A Workbook (2004); “Social Archaeology and Marxist Social Thought” in A Companion to Social Archaeology (edited by Lynn Meskell and Robert Preucel, 2004); Marx’s Ghost: Conversations with Archaeologists (2003); A Social History of Anthropology in the United States (2001); Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader (co-edited with Ida Susser, 2001); “The Rise of Capitalist Civilization and the Archaeology of Class, Gender, and Race,” in Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender (edited by James A. Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, 2000); “The Political Economy of Archaeology in the United States,” in Annual Review of Anthropology (2000); “Bridging the Gap Between Archaeology and History,” in The Entangled Past: Integrating History and Archaeology, edited by M. Boyd, J. C. Erwin, and M. Hendrickson (2000); Change and Development in the Twentieth Century (1999); Inventing Western civilization (1997); Las sociedades nucleares de Mesoamerica(1997); Making Alternative Histories: The Practice of Archaeology and History in Non-Western Settings (co-edited with Peter Schmidt, 1996); Towards a Social History of Archaeology in the United States (1995); Race, Racism, and the History of U.S. Anthropology (edited with Lee Baker, 1994); “Towards a Properly Historical Ecology,” in Historical Ecology; Cultural Knowledge and Changing Landscapes, edited by Carole L. Crumley (1994); The Inca Empire: The Formation and Disintegration of a Pre- Capitalist State (1991); “Post-Structuralism, Post-Modernism: Implications for Historians (Social History, 1989); “History and the Post-Processual Archaeologies,” Man, (1989); Power Relations and State Formation (co-edited with Christine Gailey, 1987); The Central Peruvian Prehistoric Interaction Sphere (with Richard MacNeish and David Browman); America ’s Past: A New World Archaeology (1973).