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February 1911, and perhaps because of that birth date took on a Lincolnesque appearance with dark black hair and a lean six-foot, four-inch height. He excavated and reported his results on sites from Point Barrow, Alaska, to the viru valley in Peru, but he is best known for his work in the southeastern United States.

Ford received his B.A. degree from Louisiana State University in 1936, his M.A. degree in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1938, and his doctoral degree from Columbia University in 1949. His passage through the formal requirements of academia was slowed by World War II and the pull of opportunities for fieldwork. His all-around skills in excavating and interpreting what he had found had created a market for his talents by the late 1930s. Later his position at the American Museum of Natural History enabled him to direct his own field program.

Ford and a high school associate, Moreau Chambers, worked for three summers, 1927–1929, doing survey work for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and they became closely associated with Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution at the excavation of sites in Yazoo County in 1929. Collins introduced them to northern Alaskan archaeology in 1930–1931, and he also sponsored Ford as assistant to Frank M. Setzler, also of the Smithsonian, who initiated the first labor relief program during the Great Depression at Marksville, Louisiana.

Ford is best known in the southeast United States for his excavations at Oculgee National Monument near Macon, Georgia; a group of Hopewellian mounds near Helena, Arkansas; and the Jaketown multicomponent site near Belzoni, Mississippi, in association with Philip Phillips and William G. Haag. He also coauthored reports on the early Marksville period Crooks site in LaSalle Parish, Louisiana, with gordon r. willey and on the Tchefuncte early Woodland period of southern Louisiana with George I. Quimby. A survey report in 1951 on the lower Mississippi Valley was coauthored with Phillips and james b. griffin.

The 1951 landmark survey report was a major presentation of Ford’s seriation of the pottery collections with the percentage computation of individual types per site, or site unit arranged stylistic inception, popularity, decline, and extinction. This methodology confirmed his concept of a uniform gradualistic ceramic change, and he became a convert to cultural determinism. He wanted to introduce quantitative and empirical methods to make archaeology a science, and he also employed the direct historical approach, diffusion, migration, and interareal relationships.

Ford was president of the society for american archaeology in 1963–1964, received the Spinden Award in 1966 for outstanding accomplishments in theory, methodology, and chronology, and chaired a number of southeastern archaeological conferences. He did not like large gatherings or formal social events, and he was unhappy living in or large cities. He was very effective espousing his ideas to small groups of archaeologists, and he was a versatile and ingenious innovator and a probing theoretician. He was a living refutation of his belief that an individual does not make a difference in the pattern of cultural change, for he was a leader in changing the tenor of archaeological work in the southeastern part of the United States and in South America.

James B. Griffin

France

The study of prehistory began in France. In the nineteenth century the worked stone tools that the customs officer jacques boucher de perthes collected in northern France were the oldest tools known anywhere in the world, even older than their discoverer had thought, since they dated back 700,000 years (Demoule 1990).

One hundred and fifty years later, in one of the two issues of World Archaeology devoted to “regional traditions of archaeological research,”