Dr. Brian Hayden is an author and archaeologist who has conducted research on four continents. His passion is to understand what cultures were like in the past—especially hunting and gathering cultures—and why they changed. As a student in anthropology at the University of Colorado, he was fascinated by early films of Australian Aboriginals making and using stone tools. Thanks to a Fulbright Fellowship he was able to spend a year of research in Australia studying stone tool making with Australian Aborigines. He also spent a year at the Université de Bordeaux studying prehistory and stone tool making with François Bordes. He received his doctoral degree in Archaeology from the University of Toronto.
As part of his undergraduate fieldwork, he was able to work on the Kaminaljuyu Project in Guatemala with Bill Sanders. He was again fascinated by the Maya communities in the Guatemalan mountains that retained so much of their traditional culture, even producing and using the same kinds of pottery that he excavated which were 2,000 years old. When he joined the faculty at Simon Fraser University, he returned to Guatemala to document the material culture of those villages in much more detail.
For the past 30 years, he has worked with native groups in the Interior of British Columbia recording their traditional uses of food resources and excavating a remarkable prehistoric winter village at Keatley Creek. Over the same period, he realized that some important cultural changes in the past, like the domestication of plants and animals, and the invention of pottery, could have occurred due to feasting behaviours, but that not enough was known about how traditional feasts operated in these domains. He therefore began an “ethno-archaeological” study of feasting in Southeast Asia and Polynesia. This study demonstrated how traditional feasts could have played important roles in cultural evolution, including the creation of social and economic inequalities (The Power of Feasts). One outcome of this study was the realization that secret societies in tribal cultures could also have played an important role in the development of inequalities and that this could explain the emphasis on ritual architecture in early, more complex societies. This resulted in a major book on secret societies (The Power of Ritual in Prehistory). In between these larger projects, he also managed to supervise and field test an analysis of cave art in Southwestern France by Suzanne Villeneuve.
Now a Professor Emeritus of Archaeology at Simon Fraser University and Honorary Research Associate of the Anthropology Department at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Brian Hayden has published numerous professional journal articles and books, including works on the Old Stone Age in France and a landmark synthesis of prehistoric religion (Shamans, Sorcerers, and Saints: A Prehistory of Religion). His research has been recognized by his induction into the Royal Society of Canada. Originally born in New York, Dr. Hayden now lives on Cortes Island, in coastal British Columbia.
To learn more, please see: www.sfu.ca/archaeology-old/dept/fac_bio/hayden/