the two disciplines were virtually identical in the U.S. Although Native Americans were still extant in the late nineteenth century, everyone agreed on two things: first, that these people had been greatly changed by contact with Europeans and European culture, and second, that no one cared about studying the extant groups for just that reason. American ethnology was therefore compelled to reconstruct an “ethnographic present”—a fictitious, pristine state at the brink of contact. Ethnographers did not study contemporary informants; they used them as a source of information about what the past had been like, the so-called memory culture. But when one elicits a ritual or a recipe for building a canoe or a house at a time when such things were no longer being done, such practices become isolated traits (to say nothing of the other things that happened in this process). Thus, U.S. anthropology came to focus on culture(s) as the static pattern(s) of traits. Contemporary archaeologists, once chronologies were constructed, were faced with a similar problem—reconstructing cultures from a set of traits. So U.S. archaeologists and anthropologists not only “studied Indians” but also shared strong methodological similarities, so much so that the distinction between the two fields was often blurred in the works of individuals (e.g., Kroeber 1909, 1916; Spier 1917; Wissler 1916).

Elsewhere, anthropology (notably, that of the British and French schools) was quite different. Ethnologists did not study their own ancestors, as did the archaeologists, but the “primitive” peoples of their empires. Furthermore, unlike the New World, where catastrophic epidemics had destroyed indigenous systems and left only individuals and their memories and musings, the Europeans confronted vibrant, ongoing, and fully functional systems. There had been no demographic and cultural bottleneck (Dunnell 1991). From the outset their anthropology was contemporary rather than historical and, above all, systemic. Beginning before World War II and continuing dramatically afterward, U.S. anthropology gradually came to be dominated by the British view, a condition exacerbated by the new trend for U.S. anthropologists to study peoples other than American Indians. The net result was that post–World War II archaeologists could, for the first time, be criticized as unanthropological (Taylor 1948), not because they had changed but because U.S. anthropology had. walter taylor’s Study of Archaeology (1948) was an offensive maturation of that realization and is often cited as warranting what came to be called “processualism” (e.g., Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971). As just argued, culture-history was vulnerable on reconstruction issues, and Taylor’s critique opened a door to change. Willey and Phillips’s famous dictum (1958), Archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing, was undoubtedly a response to this pressure to do anthropology. In point of fact, however, Taylor had little direct theoretical or methodological impact because his “conjunctive” approach had no better scientific warrant that did the ad hoc intuitive tack of the culture-historians.

It was into this context that the larger-than-life lewis binford stepped with a series of groundbreaking papers (e.g., 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968a, 1968b) that seemed to rectify this situation by allowing archaeology to be both anthropological in the new sense and scientific at the same time. Although this perception was to prove an illusion, Binford’s work and that of his students and colleagues altered the course of archaeology in revolutionary fashion. The central theorem powering the revolution was an argument that runs like this: (1) culture is a system; (2) the value of any one variable in a system is a function of every other variable in a system (this defines the term system); and therefore, (3) if one knows some of the values in a system, the other values may be inferred or reconstructed (e.g., Watson, LeBlanc, and Redman 1971). This argument led to the assertion that archaeology’s “failures” were inherent not in the nature of the archaeological record but in archaeology’s methodology. What was needed was methodological cleverness, and this is precisely what these “New Archaeologists” set about to achieve and what constitutes their main legacy today. This revolution, though more introspective and more given to methodologizing than that of their predecessors, did not begin with first principles or the