Lewis Binford Essay

Only child Mother from well to do family who lost $ Dad electrician laborer Josef lewis binford mother(Eoline Roberts Binford) was descended from Virginia Tidewater high society,by birth no money scout learning by doing skilled in construction laborer helped with field work later years enrolled 1948 Virinia Polytech instutte under athlete scholarship foot ball forestry biology Married Jean mock two children $ problems 1952 enrolled army GI Bill to Okinawa, where he worked with native Ryukyuan peoples. Dischared 1954 interest anthplogy UNC 1957 B. A. That turned his interests to archaeology. Under the tutelage of Joffre Coe, Binford gained valuable field experience, read the literature, and began to question the conceptual underpinnings of the discipline. Armed with the belief that archaeology could and should do far more than merely situate ancient cultures in time and space, and keen to bring it into the mainstream of anthropology, Binford went to the University of Michigan for graduate work. Influential in his education there were. White, Albert Spaulding (from whom Binford learned  analytical methods), and James Griffin, the quintessential culture historian, dean of eastern North American archaeology, and for Binford graduate adviser and symbol of all that was (and was wrong with) traditional archaeology (Sabloff, 1998, p. 13). Binford earned his M. A. in 1958 and Ph. D. in 1964 at Michigan, though Griffin did not last as his adviser. After teaching at Michigan for a year, Binford joined the University of Chicago anthropology faculty in 1961. Binford left Chicago four years later, still brash though unbowed despite having been denied  tenure. By then, at least, he had received his Ph. D. but only after Griffin was persuaded to resign from his dissertation committee (Binford, 1972, p. 11). It was the first overt breach of what was a long, acidic relationship. It was at Chicago that Binford launched what came to be called the â€Å"New Archaeology† (later, â€Å"Processual Archaeology†) with hi s landmark article â€Å"Archaeology as Anthropology† (1962). After travelling to several univ. and being fired from what he called the best uni In 1968 Binford was hired at the University of New Mexico, Still, Binford gave no quarter to postprocessualists In 1991 Binford retired from the University of New Mexico and accepted a faculty appointment at Southern 20 BIO G RA PHICAL MEMOIRS Methodist University in Dallas. There he could teach less and have more time to devote to a project he had started in the 1970s (previews of which appeared as Binford [1990, 1997]), which would become his last major book: Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Ethnographic and Environmental Data Sets (Binford, 2001).