Philip L. Kohl (1946-2022): Arqueología, Ética y Política

Juan Manuel  Vicent García; M. Isabel  Martínez Navarrete

doi:10.3989/tp.2022.12297

Authors

Juan Manuel Vicent García Instituto de Historia. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - CSIC https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2834-1985
M. Isabel Martínez Navarrete Instituto de Historia. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas - CSIC https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3060-6033

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3989/tp.2022.12297

Keywords:

Philip L. Kohl, archaeology abroad, United States of America, Soviet archaeology, Russian archaeology, Prehistory of Eurasia, Bronze Age, origin of the state, politics and archaeology, nationalism

Abstract

Philip L. Kohl (Chicago 1946 – Antrim, New Hampshire 2022) was the emeritus Kathryn Wasserman Davis Professor of Slavic Studies at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) and a specialist on the Bronze archaeology of Eurasia in Wellesley’s Department of Anthropology. His primary and secondary education in Chicago and first year of university in Massachusetts were at Jesuit institutions, until he interrupted his studies to enter the work force. As of 1966 he combined work with studies first at the University of Chicago and then at Columbia University (New York) where he graduated in Classics in 1969 with top honors. In 1968 he began his fieldwork in the excavations of Tepe Yahya (Iran). In 1969 he began graduate work in the Classics Department at Harvard University before transferring to the Department of Anthropology in 1970. There he was teaching assistant (1970-1973) and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in 1972 and 1974. That year he joined the Department of Anthropology at Wellesley, where he spent his entire career. In 1999 he became the holder Wasserman Chair until his retirement in 2016. Professor Kohl’s archaeological research focused on the Bronze Age of the Caucasus, Central Asia and the greater Near East. He considered archaeology to be a social science capable of building a humanism that could overcome the divisions imposed by colonialism and the Cold War. This led him to develop interactions with regional scientific communities based on reciprocity. His global and critical perspective permitted him to participate in the principal debates of modern archaeology. Some of these involved methodology and archaeological theory. Others were centered on the substantive archaeology of Eurasia and the Americas with respect to the origin of the State, intersocial relations, and the importance of exchange and cultural interaction in the process of change. Kohl’s work is of particular value in the current context, in which neo-empiricism and the fragmentation of archaeology, the collateral effect of the so-called “third revolution”, is combined with the revival of Kossinnian perspectives on larger processes of change as a result of the impact of palaeogenetics.

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