Lewis Binford

Abstract

Lewis R. Binford (b. 1931–d. 2011) was an American archaeologist who had a profound impact on the thinking and practice of archaeology worldwide. Binford held degrees from the University of North Carolina (BA 1957), and the University of Michigan (MA 1958, PhD 1964). From 1962 through 1968 he held multiple academic appointments, his brief stays a result of several factors, not least Binford’s powerful personality and enthusiasm for confronting archaeological orthodoxy. From 1968 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, after which he served as a distinguished professor at Southern Methodist University. He retired in 2003. In the early 1960s Binford issued a call for archaeology to become more anthropological and more scientific, and to seek the processes by which cultures adapted and changed. His efforts gave rise to the “New Archaeology” (later called “processual archaeology”), and in the ensuing decade it dominated discussions of archaeological theory and method. Although many shared the goals of the movement, differences quickly emerged as to how to achieve those goals. Binford himself grew disillusioned with what the New Archaeology was becoming, and with his own efforts to understand patterns in the archaeological record. How could one learn, from a static archaeological record in the present, about the dynamic systems that produced that record in the past? Archaeologists needed to develop a “middle range” theory, he argued, to learn from present dynamic systems and their material correlates, in order to infer past dynamics from present archaeological statics. Toward that end, he conducted ethnoarchaeological research to better understand how foragers adapted to a landscape, organized their technology, and targeted their prey. The research results, published rapid-fire in the late 1970s and the 1980s, caused a sea change in archaeological hunter-gatherer studies; introduced influential analytical measures for understanding how foragers procured, processed, and consumed prey; and helped tease apart the natural and cultural processes that affect material in a site. The effort, in turn, led Binford to question received wisdom about early human cultural evolution, most notably the role of hunting in human evolution. His ideas shook up paleoanthropology and were much debated in the 1980s and 1990s. So too were his ideas about an archaeological science. Post-processualists dismissed the idea that archaeology could be an objective science, arguing instead for a more historically constituted approach. These and other debates engaged much of Binford’s attention in his last decades, but throughout he continued his efforts to understand hunter-gatherer adaptations. Over his career he was the recipient of four honorary doctorates and multiple awards, including the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Society for American Archaeology Lifetime Achievement Award, and election to the British Academy and to the National Academy of Sciences.