following a stint with the U.S. Army in Korea he gained a B.A. in anthropology from the University of North Carolina (1957). Moving to the University of Michigan, Binford received his M.A. in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1964. Although Binford was at this stage primarily a student of North American prehistoric archaeology, his interest in world prehistory and general archaeological method and theory was already apparent.

Between 1961 and 1965, Binford taught in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, a period in which he took the first steps toward defining an original position on the relationships between archaeology and anthropology. During these years, Binford’s focus on the nature of the archaeological record, on ethnoarchaeology, on the use (and abuse) of inference and analogy in archaeology, and on understanding variability in lithic assemblages made him the center of changes sweeping the practice of archaeology in North America. Although these changes would be later thought of as “the new archaeology,” or processual archaeology, and attract a large following, it is clear that Binford was following a research agenda of research of a breadth and significance that was not widely understood.

In 1966, he left Chicago for the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and soon after moved to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It was during this period that Binford’s fame as the progenitor of the “new” archaeology first gained widespread attention, especially in 1968 with the publication of New Perspectives in Archaeology, a book of essays by the most significant of the new archaeologists, which he edited with his wife, Sally Binford. In 1968, Binford moved to the Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, staying there until he became the distinguished professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in 1991.

After 1968, Binford continued to develop his ideas about the nature of the archaeological record and the role of the archaeologist as anthropologist. He has published numerous books and articles, given conference addresses, seminar presentations, and been an invited speaker at many of the major archaeological departments around the globe. Although his focus has tended to be on the prehistoric record, Binford has undertaken significant ethnoarchaeological field research in Alaska and observed similar studies in Australia. He has also pursued fundamental research into site formation processes and taphonomy as well as continuing his interests in assemblage variability and the origins of humanity. A noted speaker and fierce debater, Binford has collected volumes of his essays, which are made more interesting still by frequent asides and vignettes of his personal history. Binford remains a strong opponent of those who seek to move archaeology away from a concern with science.

For an archaeologist of his undoubted influence and significance, Binford has been granted few honors by the members of his profession. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Southampton in the 1980s, and in 2000, the University of Leiden in the Netherlands conferred a doctorate on him.

Tim Murray

See also

United States of America, Prehistoric Archaeology

References

For references, see Encyclopedia of Archaeology: The Great Archaeologists, Vol. 2, ed. Tim Murray (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1999), 811–834.

Bird, Junius Bouton

(1907–1982)

Born in Rye, New York, Bird became an accomplished sailor and outdoorsman at an early age and sailed to the Arctic several times, where he undertook his first research in Greenland and Labrador. A pioneer of radiocarbon dating methods and the study and conservation of textiles, Bird worked as an archaeologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for fifty years.

Between 1936 and 1937 Bird excavated Fell’s Cave and other sites in Chilean Patagonia, where he found human artifacts in association with extinct fauna, establishing the antiquity of the Paleo-Indian occupation of South America. In 1941 Bird excavated a long prehistoric sequence in the Atacama region in northern