Lewis Binford - New Archaeology

New Archaeology

Binford first became dissatisfied with the present state of archaeology while an undergraduate at UNC. He felt that culture history reflected the same 'stamp collecting' mentality that had turned him away from biology. At Michigan, he saw a sharp contrast between the "excitement" of the anthropology department's cultural anthropologists (which included Leslie White) and the "people in white coats counting their potsherds" in the Kelsey Museum. His first academic position was as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, where he taught New World archaeology and statistical methods in archaeology. Shortly after his appointment he wrote his first major article, Archaeology as Anthropology (1962), which was stimulated by problems in archaeological methodology that had became apparent with the use of radiocarbon dating to verify the dates and cultural typologies generated with relative dating techniques such as seriation. Binford criticised what he saw as a tendency to treat artifacts as undifferentiated traits, and to explain variations in these traits only in terms of cultural diffusion. He proposed that the goal of archaeology was exactly the same as that of anthropology more generally, viz. to "explicate and explain the total range of physical and cultural similarities and differences characteristic of the entire spatio-temporal span of man's existence." This would be achieved by relating artifacts to human behavior, and behavior to cultural systems (as understood by his mentor, cultural anthropologist Leslie White).

Several other archaeologists at Chicago shared Binford's ideas, a group their critics began calling the "New Archaeologists". In 1966 they presented a set of papers at a meeting of the Society for American Archaeology which were later collected in the landmark New Perspectives in Archaeology (1968), edited by Binford and his then wife Sally, also an archaeologist. By the time this volume was published he had left Chicago – dismissed, according to Binford, because of increasing tension between himself and the senior archaeologists in the faculty, particularly Robert Braidwood. He moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara for a year and then on to UCLA. He did not like the atmosphere at UCLA's large faculty, and so took the opportunity to relocate to the University of New Mexico in 1969.