Sander van der Leeuw
Professor
Director, School of Human Evolution and Social Change
Ph.D., Archaeology, University of Amsterdam
SHESC Themes: Societies and their Natural Environments, Urban Societies
Field Specializations: Archaeology, Ceramic Technology, Complex Systems Theory, Ethnoarchaeology, Human-Environment Interaction, Identity and Differentiation, Land Use, Modeling and Simulation, Urban Origins and Dynamics
Regional Focus: Near East, Europe, Mediterranean, Southeast Asia. (van der Leeuw did archaeological and/or ethno-archaeological fieldwork in Syria, Holland, France, Mexico and the Philippines.)
Contact: Sander van der Leeuw, SHESC 233
Research:
An archaeologist and historian by training, van der Leeuw's personal research interests are in the study of long-term dynamics of socio-environmental systems, reconstruction of ancient technologies, (ancient and modern) regional man-land relationships, invention and innovation, urban dynamics, geographic information systems, modeling and complex systems theory. In the last 15 years, he has focused on bringing trans-disciplinary approaches to these domains.
Since 1992, he has (co-)coordinated a series of major research projects financed by the European Union in the area of socio-natural interactions and environmental problems. Among these projects are ARCHAEOMEDES I (1992-1994) and ARCHAEOMEDES II (1996-1999), concerned with understanding and modeling the natural and anthropogenic causes of desertification, land degradation and land abandonment and their spatial manifestations, using the complex systems approach. The team of 65 researchers from 11 European institutions included practitioners from physics, mathematics and computing, via geology, hydrology and the life sciences to sociology, social anthropology, history and archaeology. The fieldwork spanned all the countries along the northern Mediterranean rim. The "Environmental Communication" project (1996-8) studied the difficulties of communication between scientists and decision-makers, while the MODULUS project (1997-1999) modeled land-use decision making from a complex systems perspective. The ISCOM project (The Information Society as a Complex System, 2003-2006) investigated the relationship between innovation and urban dynamics. Currently, he is coordinating the Phoenix Innovation Study, funded by the Marion Ewing Kauffman Foundation, for ASU.
His publications include 17 books and over a hundred papers and articles on archaeology, ancient technologies, socio-environmental and sustainability issues, as well as invention and innovation.
Research Projects:
Integrating Socio-Ecological Sciences Through a Community Modeling Framework
Mediterranean Landscape Dynamics
The Phoenix Innovation Study
The Promise and Challenge of Archaeological Data Integration
Teaching:
After teaching appointments at Leyden, Amsterdam; Cambridge (UK); and Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne), van der Leeuw is presently professor at Arizona State University. He has held visiting positions at the University of Michigan, the University of Reading (UK), Australian National University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Chicago and the Santa Fe Institute, and has lectured in many parts of the world.
Service:
In July 2001, van der Leeuw was appointed Secretary-General of the French Conseil National de Coordination des Sciences de l'Homme et de la Société (National Council for the Coordination of the Humanities and Social Sciences). This was followed by an appointment as Deputy Director for Social Sciences at the CNRS (2002-2003) and at the National Institute for the Sciences of the Universe, in charge of a program similar to the Long Term Ecological Research program in the US. In 2003, he was appointed chair of the Department of Anthropology at Arizona State University in the US, where he is now director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, an interdisciplinary unit based around anthropology that focuses on some of the major challenges of the 21st century. Currently, he is treasurer of the International Human Dimensions in Global Environmental Change Programme. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute (USA), a correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds a chair at the Institut Universitaire de France.
Select Publications:
van der Leeuw, S. & Kohler, T. (Eds.) (2007) The model-based archaeology of socio-natural systems. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research.
van der Leeuw, S., Favory, F. & Fiches, J.-L. (Eds.) (2003). Archéologie et systèmes socio-environnementaux: études multiscalaires sur la vallée du Rhône dans le programme ARCHAEOMEDES Valbonne: Presses du CNRS (Monographies du CRA).
van der Leeuw, S. & Lévèque C. (Eds.) (2003). Quelles natures voulons nous? Pour une approche socio-écologique du champ de l'environnement. Paris: Elsevier.
van der Leeuw, S. (1998). The Archaeomedes Project - Understanding the natural and anthropogenic causes of land degradation and desertification in the Mediterranean. Luxemburg: Office for Official Publications of the European Union.
van der Leeuw, S., Pumain, D. et al. (1998) Des Oppida aux métropoles Paris : Anthropos (Collection Villes).
van der Leeuw, S. & McGlade, J. (Eds.) (1997). Archaeology: Time, process and structural transformations. London: Routledge.
van der Leeuw, S. (Ed.) (1995). L'Homme et la dégradation de l'environnement. Antibes : APDCA (Actes du XVe Colloque international d'archéologie et d'histoire d'Antibes).