there are indications that the murals were never quite completed.

Peter Mathews

See also

Maya Civilization

Bordes, François

(1919–1981)

One of the most influential Paleolithic archaeologists of the twentieth century, François Bordes was most famous for his standard Mousterian stone tool typology. He created the typology during the 1950s and refined it over the next decades until it gained enormous influence in the classification of Mousterian materials in Europe and southwestern Asia.

Bordes’s great area of influence was in the heartland of French Paleolithic archaeology, southwestern france, including the Périgord region, and is best expressed by his classic excavation of the sites of Combe Grenal and Pech de l’Azé. Bordes’s great advance on previous classifications was in his use of statistical analysis for very large assemblages, which allows the archaeologist to plot changing distribution of artifact types between sites and over time. Bordes also argued that his system allowed the archaeologist to identify the existence of distinct tribes during the Mousterian period in southwestern France, his logic being that distinct toolmaking traditions were the expression of distinct tribal ethnicities. This argument was strongly contested by American archaeologist lewis binford (among others), who contended that the variability that Bordes had identified was more likely the product of the different functions the tools were used to perform, different raw materials, different stages in a total production process for tools (reduction sequence), or different