of enforced economic and cultural dependency. Irrespective of the value of the opposing positions in the debate, persistent complaints of paternalism by African archaeologists forced the French minister of cooperation to convene a dedicated conference of francophone African and French archaeologists in May 1978 to try to repair relations.

As a result of that conference, France agreed to fund concrete programs to better train African students, to establish cooperative research budgets, to create subventions for scientific and popular publication, and to promulgate rules about the full publication of research results and about the final disposition of artifacts. Many of these promises have been kept, and there has been laudable support for African publications (for example, Editions Karthala), the Malian program of site inventory (Inventaire des Sites Archéologiques de la Zone Lacustre), and the highly successful salvage operations in the Agades Basin (Programme Archéologique d’Urgence, Niger). Less successful, however, has been the response to the principal demand of the African participants in the 1978 conference, namely, to respect local research priorities.

Among those local priorities are more research on the recent past (counter to the general French passion for the Stone Age), ethnoarchaeology, preservation of historic monuments, help in establishing a basic series of radiocarbon dates, and, especially, abandonment of the neo-evolutionary stadial (Neolithique, medieval) and artifact sequences that ultimately say more about European concepts of prehistory than about African realities. Perhaps the major focus of African disappointment on the issue of respect for local research priorities are the “cooperants,” French researchers seconded to African research institutes for the purpose of teaching and pursuing joint research. Many cooperants have done fine work and are generous. What Africans notice, however, is how few truly collaborative projects involve cooperants and how little effort has been taken—as in French national policy—to sensitize cooperants to African sensibilities about paternalism (the unspoken but implicit sense that “I know better what they need to do”). France has not always sent out its best, and too often, a cooperant retains de facto control over research budgets. In recent years, the program has been eliminated or severely curtailed in, for example, Senegal, Mauritania, and Mali.

The flip side of paternalism is, of course, exclusivity. Exclusivity in archaeology is, at least, the logical extension of the complaint of Audouze and Leroi-Gourhan that French archaeology is a “continental insularity.” French Africanist archaeologists are no less dismissive than their metropolitan counterparts of what they consider to be the myopic empiricism of German archaeologists and the excessive theorizing on the part of their English and American counterparts. Jean Devisse (1981, 8 n. 29) reflects on this prevailing sentiment: “Le besoin de ‘modèles’—ou de problematique—très acceptable pour un esprit de culture anglo-saxonne devient vite dangereux dans les régions de culture ‘française’ où la tentation est constante d’absolutiser l’hypothèse de travail pour en faire une certitude démontre” (“the need for models, or a problematic, very acceptable for the Anglo-Saxon cultural spirit, becomes quickly dangerous in the regions of French culture where the constant temptation is to absolutely hypothesize how the work is carried out to make it demonstrably certain”). Devisse’s prescription for researchers in La Francophonie is to go into the field unshackled by hypotheses or research designs, collect facts that will speak for themselves, and make logical deductions from the very nature of things—precisely the argument made by the Viennese Wm. Schmidt when responding to criticism that his Kulturkreise were purely imaginary entities.

Such statements show a profound misunderstanding of theory and hypothesis building, not as an edifice to be proved, but as causal propositions to be falsified. Such fear of theory shows a profound misunderstanding of the decentralized nature of the academy and of research funding in the United States and Britain. There, the research structure is very different from the authoritarian, core, and top-heavy nature of research in France (where the word baronial is often used). To those who know the beginnings of “the new archaeology,” it will come as no surprise