1st Edition

Debating Archaeology Updated Edition

By Lewis R Binford Copyright 2009

    In this volume, the founder of processual archaeology, Lewis R. Binford collects and comments on the twenty-eight substantive papers published in the 1980's, the third in his set of collected papers (also Working at Archaeology and An Archaeological Perspective). This ongoing collection of self-edited papers, together with the extensive and very candid interstitial commentaries, provides an invaluable record of the development of "The New Archaeology" and a challenging view into the mind of the man who is certainly the most creative archaeological theorist of our time. A new (2009) foreword allows further reflections on his work.

    I: Introduction; 1: “Culture” and Social Roles in Archaeology; 2: The New Archaeology, Then and Now; II: Much Ado about Nothing; 3: Science to Seance, or Processual to “Post-Processual” Archaeology; 4: In Pursuit of the Future; 5: Data, Relativism, and Archaeological Science; 6: Review of Hodder, Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology; III: Empiricism and Other Problems in Contemporary Archaeology; 7: Coping with Debate Tactics; 8: Reply to “More on the Mousterian: Flaked Bone from Cueva Morín,” by L. Freeman; 9: “Brand X” versus the Recommended Product; 10: “Righteous Rocks” and Richard Gould: Some Observations on Misguided “Debate”; 11: Richard Gould Revisited, or Bringing Back the “Bacon”; 12: An Alyawara Day: The Stone Quarry; 13: An Alyawara Day: Flour, Spinifex Gum, and Shifting Perspectives; 14: An Alyawara Day; 15: Butchering, Sharing, and the Archaeological Record; 16: Styles of Style; 17: Researching Ambiguity: Frames of Reference and Site Structure; IV: Models and Accommodating Arguments versus Pattern Recognition: What Drives Research Best?; 18: Multidimensional Analysis of Sheep and Goats: Baa-ck and Forth; 19: The Hunting Hypothesis, Archaeological Methods, and the Past; 20: Letter to H. T. Bunn; 21: Bones of Contention: A Reply to Glynn Isaac; 22: Human Ancestors; 23: Fact and Fiction about the Zinjanthropus Floor: Data, Arguments, and Interpretations; 24: Hyena Scavenging Behavior and Its Implications for the Interpretation of Faunal Assemblages from FLK 22 (the Zinj Floor) at Olduvai Gorge; 25: Were There Elephant Hunters at Torralba?; 26: Searching for Camps and Missing the Evidence? Another Look at the Lower Paleolithic; 27: Technology of Early Man: An Organizational Approach to the Oldowan; 28: Isolating the Transition to Cultural Adaptations: An Organizational Approach; V: Conclusions; 29: Coping with Culture

    Biography

    Lewis R Binford