Q CHICAGU JOURNALS

Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research

An Interview With Lewis Binford

Author(s): Colin Renfrew
Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 28, No. 5 (Dec., 1987), pp. 683-694
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743367
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Reports

An Interview with
Lewis Binford‘
COLIN RENFREW
Cambridge, England. X 86

CR: Let's go right back—tell us something about your

early days.

LB: I went to high school in Norfolk, Virginia, and most

of my schooling was done on the coast. I really wasn't
interested in school—I was much more interested in
trapping muskrats and wandering around out on the
mudflats. ,.<

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CR: There are many schoolboys like that!

LB: I think that my high-school grade-point average was

f?/1 9'

perhaps one-tenth of a point above failure. It was not

until I went to college that I got interested in formal
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CR: What did you do after high school? Qéwzzgi

‘%‘=-xv

LB: I went to college (Virginia Polytechnic Institute).

Lewis Binford. (Photo © [eff Alexander)
CR: In wildlife biology?

LB: That's right.
CR: Were your parents interested in wildlife or in an-
thropological issues?
LB: No, not really. After I had been made a professor at
the University of Chicago, my mother once—in all hon-
esty—asked me, "Well, you're st1'11 in school, when are
you going to quit going to school and come home and go
to work?" My father understood much more about my
life than my mother and my grandmother. There was
support in the sense that ”that's a nice thing to do, to go
to college," but there was not much involvement.
CR: Right. And so at college you were doing a wildlife
biology course. Was that structured in a way that one
would be interested in today? Was it ecologically
oriented, or was it very traditional?
1. © 1987 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological
Research. All rights reserved 0011-3204/87/2805-ooo4$1.00.
LB: I guess the best way to tell you what it was like is
that I had gotten interested and done quite well as a
student, and the head of the department called me in and
said, "You're doing very well. . . . There's probably a
future for you in biology. Are you thinking in those
terms?" And I said, ”Well, yes, it's interesting." And he
said, "Well, you know, biology's not what it used to be.
When I was a student there were many more species that
nobody had looked at. Now most of them have been
looked at, but there are still a few species of blind cave
salamanders that nobody has studied, and I'm sure if you
apply yourself you'll be able to pick one of those off." So
I suppose that gave me second thoughts about a future in
biology in those days.
CR: And immediately after that you were drafted into
military service and went to Iapan as an interpreter?
LB: And in that role—by some fluke of military nonra-
tionality—I became the interpreter for a group of an-
thropologists whose job was resettling displaced persons
off Iwo Iima, Saipan, and so forth, at the end of the war.
683
 684 | CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
It was through them that I learned something about an-
thropology. And did some archaeology. Today I wouldn't
claim that it was archaeology, but when the military
formed the Strategic Air Command and started putting
bases in the Far East, they chose Okinawa to be one of
the major sites. Before that decision the base at Okinawa
was just a series of dirt roads, and the military personnel
were living in squad tents. Then they put a lot of money
into building the strategic air bases, and in the course of
this they had to destroy a lot of obvious monuments,
many of which were tombs. The military's attitude was,
"Well, these are recent, and we need a team to go around
and find out who owns them and pay them off for mov-
ing them, or whatever." So since I spoke the language, I
was made part of the team whose job was to go around
and find the families who were the owners of the tombs.
Most of these tombs turned out to be archaeological,
going 'way, 'way back. And so a couple of other fellows
and I hatched a plan that these should be salvaged and
that the material should be put into a museum at Shuri,
where the museum had been destroyed. It was a kind of
public-relations act. Then I was suddenly in the position
of having to clean out those tombs and take care of the
artifacts and work with some local historians, trying to
figure out what some of this meant. At that time I'd
never heard the word ”stratigraphy." Fortunately, I had
some help, because there were some anthropologists
around.
CR: So when you left the military you went back to
college to do anthropology? What governed your choice
of school?
LB: I went back and tried first at the University of Vir-
ginia, but since they didn't have an anthropology depart-
ment the military offered a little bit of a subsidy for
study elsewhere. The basic advice I got was to go to the
University of North Carolina, which was very close, so
the decision was made in strictly economic terms.
CR: And who was there that was interesting?
LB: The archaeologist there was Ioffre Coe [now retired].
The anthropologists there were Iohn Gillin and Iohn
Honigmann, and there were some very interesting soci-
ologists—one of them Guy Iohnson [all three deceased].
It was a small department, but the faculty were very
enthusiastic in the sense that they knew their material
well and were very encouraging to students. It was a
good learning experience.
CR: Now, that was a first course. To what extent did
that involve specialization? Was it just generalized an-
thropology?
LB: I took courses across the board—in linguistics, phys-
ical anthropology, social anthropology, and archaeology.
During that time I found I couldn't make it too well on a
military subsidy, so I started my own business. I had a
small contracting business in North Carolina, and I
guess before I left as a graduate student we'd built 31
structures. At one point I had a number of people work-
ing for me. I was living in veterans’ housing, and on
Saturday mornings I'd have a line waiting outside our
house to get paid. So I did lots of things aside from taking
courses.
CR: And some of the necessary skills you'd leamed as a
boy?
LB: Yes, that's right, because I was doing construction
work all the time I was in high school. I guess if the
family had had their way I would have been a contractor.
That had been what I'd been encouraged in all along, not
this business of running off after animals!
CR: Well, this kept you in cigarettes while you were
living there. Now, this was the first B.A. or M.A.?
LB: I did both. I had my choice when I came back to the
States to go into the M.A. program, but I was advised
that I would have to pick up a lot of undergraduate back-
ground in an M.A. So what I did was choose to take a
bachelor's—which I did fairly quickly—and then on to
the M.A., and then I had the background. I did the work
for both in two and a half years.
CR: Did this involve any thesis component? What I'm
getting at is where you began to specialize and when you
began to turn towards archaeology.
LB: The M.A. involved a thesis, and although I wrote the
thesis I never pursued the degree at North Carolina,
since I knew I had to do it over again at Michigan. That
thesis was basically what I later developed as my doc-
toral dissertation at Michigan [I964]. It was on the in-
teraction between Native Americans and the earliest
English colonists in Virginia, and it was based on site
surveys I had started when I was in North Carolina, an
attempt, really, to tie down the archaeological remains
of known ethnic groups. I went through the historical
literature to try and find locations and then tried to find
on the ground where various American Indians had been
living at the time of colonization. I wanted to find out
how ethnicity varied in recognizable things when we
could get some controls.
CR: What led you into that? Partly the availability of
materials, I suppose.
LB: Partly. And partly what I knew before I went into the
field. I used to like to go out into the woods, and I found
a number of sites, one of which the landowner was quite
interested in. There was a lot of local history about this
site. It was in an area that had been set aside in the early
16oos as one of the first Indian reservations. This place
had always interested me, so when I got into archaeology
and people said, ”What're you going to do?", I said,
"Well, I'll start from there and expand out, because I
already know something about it. I'll start from there

trying to nail down these groups in the colonial period. II
I basically picked up in terms of research what I had
stumbled onto as an interested teen-ager.
CR: Where was that doctorate written?
LB: The University of Michigan.
CR: So you moved on from North Carolina to Michigan.
What prompted that move?
LB: When I finished at North Carolina I applied to a
number of places for scholarships and support. Ioffre
Coe, the main archaeologist at North Carolina, was a
Michigan product and knew the people there. Iimmy
Griffin [now retired] was there, and in those days he was
the king of Eastern archaeology, so it seemed the logical
place to go. They also gave me a good offer, so I started in
their doctoral program. I got an M.A. there; they had a
core program that everybody—no matter what your de-
grees were—had to take. So I got a Master's at Ann Ar-
bor in one year and then basically finished my Ph.D., but
that's not shown on the degree date. There's about a
four-year lapse between when I in fact finished it and
when I was awarded the degree.
CR: As I recall from your passages in your book An
Archaeological Perspective [I972], there was some
difficulty.
LB: Yes, there was.
CR: When did you begin to feel that there were things to
be dissatisfied about in the presentation of archaeology
as a discipline?
LB: When I was in archaeology at the University of
North Carolina, I remember a group of graduate students
sitting around in a discussion. One of the archaeology
professors came into the room and heard what we were
talking about, and the group turned to him and said,
”What can we look forward to in terms of accomplish-
ment? " And he said, "Well, if you work hard you may be
able to get a focus named after you." This seemed in-
credibly like the comment that I had heard earlier in
wildlife biology. I thought that there must be more to it
than this. Gradually, by the time I was at Michigan cer-
tainly, I had decided that the problem didn't rest with
me, that there was much less there than met the eye!
CR: So tell us about the Michigan years, when some of
these dissatisfactions surfaced.
LB: Well, Ann Arbor was an exciting place. It was a
fantastically stimulating faculty, with good interaction
among the faculty—in fact, they represented a wide vari-
ety of both experiences and viewpoints.
CR: In addition to Griffin, who were the interesting peo-
ple?
Volume 28, Number 5, December 1987 | 685
LB: The excitement was not in the museum, the excite-
ment was in the department of anthropology, where
there was Leslie White [deceased], Elman Service
[retired], and Dick Beardsley [deceased]. In the United
States, our degrees are in anthropology, not archaeology.
No matter what you do with the stones and bones, your
basic education and what you test it on is the field of
anthropology, so the coursework and the kind of argu-
ment that we engaged in with the faculty were very, very
stimulating. You went from Angell Hall—which was
where the social anthropology and cultural anthropology
courses were held—all excited, and you walked back
over to the museum, and there were all those people in
white coats counting their potsherds! Then you tried to
figure out how to relate those two worlds. I mean, here's
a world of exciting things and here's a world of mun-
dane, little tasks. The material comes from a common
set of conditions—human behavior—so how do we go
from one to the other? There was a lot of discussion with
colleagues and graduate students and a great deal of en-
couragement in this kind of thought. There was a kind of
tension in the department between the archaeologists
and the nonarchaeologists and anthropologists, and that
was a natural thing to fall into.
CR: And so one could see that things were dull and that
there were problems not being responded to, but in what
sort of constructive activity did that result? I mean, did
one feel that there ought to be a different way of digging
or that one should be processing material in a different
way? How did this surface?
LB: My initial response was that we had to learn how to
look differently—not just record things accurately but
learn how to get information out of what remains to us
in terms other than the conventions that were then be-
ing used to interpret them. So the question was, How
does one look in new ways? That was probably as far as I
went in the very early days. I was interested in all kinds
of statistical techniques, analytical strategies that would
allow you to see patterning and properties of the data
base that weren't obvious when you just dug the pottery
up.
CR: Was that when you started playing around with
those pipestems?
LB: Yes, because we had to look again at what we
saved—in those days nobody saved flint chips, nobody
saved bones, and a lot of the archaeological record was
being chucked because no one could figure out how to
deal with it. So one of the early things that I was con-
cemed with was what we can do with flint flakes, with
the common items that we recover but that most ar-
chaeologists throw away. If you can get information out
of the most common items, you get a better comparative
framework than if you work with just the rare items.
Looking at bones, looking at lithic debris was the first
step. Later on, when I was doing historical-sites ar-
chaeology, I began to worry about how to get informa-
686 | CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
tion out of nails because in those days nails were thrown
away and you only saved "better" things.
The other thing was how to integrate observations,
and some of the early work I did on mortuary stuff is of
this type. Trying to take infonnation from what we
know about cremation and what fire does to bones ver-
sus whether things are burned or not, whether they're
broken or not, where you've got multidepositional con-
texts. All these various components somehow interact
and are not just things for which you tabulate presence
and absence. That was an early extension of the "how
we look" strategy, and once you begin trying to integrate
you immediately talk about organizations and systems.
CR: Let me ask you, did you have much reading in the
philosophy of science or methodology of science at that
time?
LB: No. I had read some, but it was just sort of textbook
reading—-a liberal-arts-education approach to philoso-
phy, so to speak.
CR: You were at Michigan for quite a long time?
LB: Well, from '57 to '61. In I96I I went to Chicago as an
assistant professor—a very junior professor, but I was on
the teaching faculty.
CR: How did you get your job in Chicago? Was it adver-
tised?
LB: Not exactly. I was brought for an interview and went
through the normal presentation to the faculty and
meeting with the students and all that and was offered
the job while I was still there. So there were things going
on behind the scenes. In those days, though, you didn't
have to advertise; most jobs were filled through an inter-
nal network.
CR: What were your teaching duties in Chicago?
LB: What they wanted me to do was teach New World
archaeology, and statistics and methodology.
CR: Your first major article was called “Archaeology as
Anthropology" [I962], wasn't it?
LB: That was written at Chicago. I had been working
analytically on lots of things—mainly mortuary stuff-
because it was very clear in the Midwest in those days
that you had cultures that were defined almost exclu-
sively on mortuary criteria and other cultures that were
described in terms of what we would call midden mate-
rials. When we began to get C14 dates, it became clear
that these were not independent, that they had to be in
some way components of the same system. With the C14
chronology came the recognition that we had an awful
lot of things defined in ways that didn't make any sense
in terms of what we knew about the social system. That
was pushing a lot of people—not just me—in the direc-
tion of trying to figure out how we could have come to
the same conclusion if we hadn't had the dates rammed
down our throats by C14 technology. Clearly, our meth-
odology was not adequate; we were seeing the world
incorrectly.
CR: And it was actually the contemporaneity of the
dates that forced this issue? In Europe it was a different
experience; it was the question of diffusion—which
came first, and so on. But your lesson was that these
things were coming out contemporary and you didn't
expect that?
LB: Right. They were thought to be sequential and had
been seriated and regionalized, but they were coming
out, in many cases, roughly contemporary.
CR: I didn't realize that one of the factors spurring on
the New Archaeology in the New World was C14.
LB: Yes. Well, of course in the early days of C14 so few
things were dated that as soon as you began to worry
about your own methodology everything was up for
grabs. That was very true for many of the "cultures" in
the Midwest that were defined almost exclusively in
terms of mortuary data. It was a very rich area for mor-
tuary practice, and because mounds are obvious things
to dig there was a better data base. I can remember going
to meetings and hearing people seriously saying, "There
are big mounds in Ohio, and nobody ever lived in Ohio.
They came all the way from Georgia to bury their dead! "
because they couldn't find what they were looking for—
the village material with the same stylistic criteria that
were described in the mortuary material. Well, im-
mediately you say that maybe there are functionally
specific mortuary vessels and you aren't ever going to
find them in the middens. So C14 helped with this kind
of argument.
CR: Right, so you obviously went to work with a much-
reinforced skepticism. Now, there was a seminar in
Chicago, was there not, where this skepticism surfaced?
Tell us a bit about that.
LB: Well, that was actually, I think, the most exciting
teaching experience of my life, because the faculty at
Chicago was quite interesting. Unlike many other facul-
ties, it was really committed to education. We'd meet on
Mondays at the faculty club and discuss the program in
great detail—how a course is to be organized, what's the
best sequence of presentation—in order to teach stu-
dents. The result was that they were very innovative
classes, and I think one of the most exciting experiences
of my life was being asked to teach a course that was
then called ”The Human Career." It was a full-year
course, and there were basically five permanent faculty
and usually one or more visitors participating for a
whole year, together. When I first started participating in
it, the normal sequence was that you'd start with the
early time period and come up to at least the origins of

the state in one year. Clark Howell [now at the Univer-
sity of Califomia, Berkeley] was in charge but was not
the only professor present for the early time reaches, and
then he and Robert Braidwood [retired] would overlap,
and then Bob Adams [the Secretary, Smithsonian III-
stitution] would come in and overlap with Braidwood. I
was supposed to overlap with both, because I was sup-
posed to compare New World developments with what
was going on in Braidwood's and Adams's world, the Old
World. And add to this the visitors—we had Francois
Bordes from the University of Bordeaux [deceased], we
had I. Desmond Clark [retired], we had Carl-Axel
Moberg from the University of Gothenburg [deceased],
we had Alberto Blanc from Italy [deceased], so each year
would be different depending on the expertise of the
guests. You were participating as a teacher, but you were
also having to participate in a debate with somebody else
as you introduced your material relative to his. It was a
tremendously interactive class, and it was in there that I
suppose I began to get in trouble.
CR: This was the first time you got in trouble, was it,
Lew?
LB: No, but it was much more sensitive. Because before,
you could write your little article, you could talk to your
friends, but basically you weren't confronting one of the
giants of the field three days a week in terms of his
material. I got along fine with Clark Howell—we never
had any particular problems—but with Braidwood and
then with Adams, to some extent, things began to get
strained.
CR: The Neolithic Revolution came in for reconsider-
ation?
LB: Yes, exactly.
CR: It must be in response to this that you wrote that
amusing article, ”The Predatory Revolution” [Binford
and Binford I966].
LB: Yes, it was.
CR: And I think you once told me that it had been writ-
ten as a spoof and that you were rather amazed when it
was in fact accepted for publication and taken absolutely
straight-faced.
LB: The editor realized it was a spoof, but he treated it as
a serious article and sent it out for peer review and got all
those comments back that were just unbelievable. All
the readers took it absolutely seriously.
CR: But he didn't have the CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
staff on that!
LB: The editor sent me all those replies, because he
knew I'd be amused. I guess I still have them some-
where. I would love to know who wrote them—they
were anonymous—because they were just astonishing.
Volume 28, Number 5, December I987 | 687
CR: That must have caused a raised eyebrow back in the
Oriental Institute.
LB: Yes. During that time I was really working with the
vast majority of the students at Chicago. They were good
students—you'd just say, ”Why don't you try this?" and
they'd go off working themselves to death and come
back with really stimulating stuff. The student popula-
tion in Chicago was just wonderful to work with.
CR: Was Henry Wright [now at the University of Michi-
gan] there at that time?
LB: Well, in the early days it was Bill Longacre [now at
the University of Arizona], Stuart Struever [North-
westem University], Les Freeman [University of
Chicago], Tom Lynch [Comell University], and Mel
Aikens [University of Oregon]. That was the early group.
CR: A very distinguished group indeed!
LB: Then Bob Whallon [University of Michigan] and
Dick Gould [Brown University] came from Harvard to-
gether. Later Henry Wright came from Michigan. Chris
Peebles [Indiana University] came—he had been an
undergraduate at Chicago. And then Iim Hill [University
of California at Los Angeles] and a lot of others came; it
was a super bunch of people, really.
CR: And those are probably most of the names that one
associates with the early days of the New Archaeology.
LB: Yes. In terms of interesting work from an analytical
standpoint it was Longacre, Hill, Struever, and Whallon
who did most of the things that had an early impact.
From a worrying-about-problems standpoint, Flannery
[University of Michigan] was very much to the fore, be-
cause Flannery was the field man par excellence. The
problem of getting Flannery a degree was that you
couldn't get him out of the field long enough to examine
him! So in this group you not only had a lot of very smart
people but you had a tremendous breadth of experience
in a student group that fed itself in a really interesting
way.
CR: And at what point—was it then or was it very much
later?—was there a feeling of coming together as a group
in some sense? One thinks of the New Archaeology as
your work and the work of these people.
LB: There was a bit of snobbery here, because when we
really started doing all these various things—looking at
techniques and worrying about analytical strategies and
models and processes and that sort of thing—there
wasn't another place where there was a whole group
doing this. There were individuals, but they were fre-
quently isolated, like Howard Winters [New York Uni-
versity], just off somewhere working in the museum.
There was no group involved in doing this anyplace else
in the United States at that particular point. When we
688 | CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
would crank up and go to a meeting, it was not just a
paper, it was six papers, and we were perceived as a
group, as a social unit, not just as isolated individuals. So
there was a bit of interaction between how we were per-
ceived and what the reality was. The term ”New Ar-
chaeology" was invented by our critics, "Oh, another
paper by the New Archaeologists." It was scathing, but
we just decided to live with it and shove it down their
throats.
CR: There was one conference meeting, I think, when
there were a number of papers together, where you first
made a major impact together.
LB: Boulder in I963 was the first time we did a big set of
papers at a Society for American Archaeology meeting.
Then later, I believe it was '6 5 or '66, we did it again, and
that was what we later put together into New Perspec-
tives in Archaeology [Binford and Binford I968].
CR: And how long did you stay in Chicago?
LB: I went there in '6I and I left in '65.
CR: Why did you move away from Chicago?
LB: I was fired.
CR: Well, that explains that!
LB: I finished my degree by their deadline for me to
finish, but up until the deadline everybody could say,
”We don't know whether he's going to finish or not." So
there was this uncertainty about whether I in fact would
have a degree, and that was one element. The other ele-
ment was that by then Braidwood had had enough, and
so it was a very easy way of making a decision.
CR: Right. And that was when you moved to Santa Bar-
bara, is that it?
LB: Yes.
CR: And you were in Santa Barbara for about a year?
LB: I was in Santa Barbara for a year, and then I went to
UCLA.
CR: Now tell me what you were thinking about and
doing in terms of your own substantive research at that
time. You'd finished your doctorate on these questions
of contact between locals and colonists. Obviously you
were into post-Pleistocene adaptations. Was that at the
forefront of your thinking for a while?
LB: From my first real contact with the Mousterian, I
felt that that was the biggest challenge. Archaeological
interpretation in the Old World seemed to be an even
more tenuous house of cards than in the New World.
CR: You made an analogy, then, and said, ”Right, I can
see what might be wrong with this."
LB: Yes. I had always wanted to do Old World archaeol-
ogy, but basically I had been counseled early on that
because I wasn't wealthy, it was impossible. There was a
kind of wealthy club that could do Old World stuff, and
the doors weren't open very much.
CR: And when did you in fact first visit Europe, visit the
Old World?
LB: I958. It was part of what we had to leam, so I took
the opportunity to go and do some fieldwork, just as a
student. After that, I began to read Old World stuff much
more systematically.
CR: And after Santa Barbara you moved on to Los
Angeles. Was that an atmosphere where you were able
to teach productively?
LB: I found it frustrating in a new way. It was a new
experience. It was a very large department with lots of
students, and my first impression was, ”Well, golly. I
don't know who's on the faculty! " Every month or so I'd
meet somebody else and find out he or she was a col-
league: ”Didn't know that one before!" Impression
Number z was about working with students. It was what
I would classify as a cafeteria-style education. There was
none of the commitment that I was accustomed to from
Chicago. There was never a meeting on the student pro-
gram. The philosophy was, we don't meet; we don't see
each other; each person teaches his little thing, and stu-
dents go around among these people and develop patron-
client relationships. If somebody takes you on, you'll be
championed through the degree program, and all you
have to do is what you're told. I didn't think that stu-
dents were getting a very broad education, and I didn't
like the kind of patronage, that is, ”These are so-and-so's
students, and these are so-and-so's students, and these
are somebody else's students; and they only do this, and
they only do that." The result was of course tremendous
factionalism in that department—among the faculty. If
you went into some colleague's office and said, ”Do you
think it would be worth my doing so-and-so, if the stu-
dents are going from my introductory course into your
class? Would you like me to cover this case instead of
that?" they'd immediately want to know what your hid-
den motives were. Although there were complications
at Chicago and at Santa Barbara, there was interaction.
And one leamed from one's colleagues in some sense of
the word, either negatively or positively. At UCLA, you
could go onto the campus, meet with your students,
meet your class, and go home again—and never see any-
body, never hear an idea.
Those big departments in those days, in the late '6os,
were huge. I had I, 300 students in an introductory class
at UCLA! I never saw their faces. You're up on a plat-
form with lights, and you don't even see them. Also, we

had bomb threats every other day because we were
teaching evolution, bomb threats coming from fun-
damentalists in Orange County, and people picketing
outside the door with antievolutionist literature. It was
like a zoo, I thought, being in Los Angeles in those days.
So I let the word out at a meeting or two that I would
like to move to a smaller department where there was
more corporate involvement in education. I was sitting
in my office at UCLA one day and got a phone call, ”Will
you come to Albuquerque?" It took me about two and a
half seconds to say ”Yes" and "Where does the train
leave from?" I went down and looked the place over and
interviewed and saw that it was a place where I could be
comfortable, and I went to Albuquerque at the beginning
of I969.
CR: Right. I'd like to pause at this point to survey the
New Archaeology. Often one thinks of the New Ar-
chaeology as dating almost from your article ”Archaeol-
ogy as Anthropology" and then as reaching a certain
degree of completion with your edited volume New Per-
spectives in Archaeology and with David Clarke's [I 968]
Analytical Archaeology, published in the same year.
What do you feel looking over the New Archaeology up
to that time? Let's say that it was of age in '68. What did
the New Archaeology achieve?
LB: Well, I think that we were exploring new ways of
looking for pattems; we were seeing new kinds of pat-
teming that it was hard to accommodate in the old con-
ventions. The conventions that had been in use were not
very useful, but the next step had not been taken, and
that was ”What do we put in their place? How do we
forge a methodology? How do we proceed?" There were
lots of noises being made in that direction, but I never
thought we knew how, at that point. It was because of
that feeling on my part that I really pulled out of the
arguments for quite a while. There were all those meet-
ings going on endlessly in the United States in the late
’6os and early '7os in which everybody was standing up
and waving a flag, and my response was, "I don't have
anything to say." just standing up and knocking down
and saying something's inadequate—we've done that.
Saying what needs to be in its place—I'm not sure what
to say. By the time of the Sheffield conference [Renfrew
I973], I was already in the middle of the Nunamiut
work. That was my response: ”Let's go out“ among them
and see if we can come up with something that's better."
CR: How did you perceive the archaeological scene in
Britain and, indeed, in Europe at that time?
LB: Well, I was a little bit surprised at the way it was
proceeding, because certainly during the time that the
Chicago bunch was working, we never thought that we
had a philosophical answer to epistemological problems.
It was much more an ad hoc consideration of how you
reason, what's logical and what's not, what's plausible
and what's not. Basically the arguments about deductive
Volume 28, Number 5, December I987 I 689
reasoning were in a sense rubbing people's noses in it.
Arguments about deductive reasoning were powerful in
the context of evaluating ideas already extant, but I
didn't think that anyone could see how you could use
them for generating new ideas. So when I came to
Sheffield I was a bit surprised by what I considered to be
the philosophical interest. Back home we saw the solu-
tion as going out first and finding out what the problems
were in terms of patterning and the archaeological
record and what it was we had to explain, whereas in
Sheffield there was a slightly different emphasis—in dis-
cussion anyway—on which philosopher was right and
which one was wrong. I didn't think that was what the
real issue was.
CR: And how did you enjoy the encounter with Edmund
Leach?
LB: Oh, I actually enjoyed it, in a funny sense, because it
was so predictable, and he said exactly what I was hop-
ing some social anthropologist would say [Leach I973].
From my perspective, then and still, the social an-
thropological perspective is that of the participant in a
system; it is not that of one trying to explain the system.
It is that of the person trying to explain why he partici-
pates in a system; why he behaves the way he does. So
for Leach to come out and say what he did—very power-
fully, I've quoted it all over the place-
CR: The black box. . . .
LB: The black box—was sort of perfect for me, and I kind
of smiled and said, "Now I've got something to quote for
a long time." It was very clear to me that the major
question in social anthropology was how you explain the
behavior of individuals, but the emphasis was still on
why individuals behave the way they do; and the answer
to that is always that they behave that way because
that's the way they are acculturated to behave. Culture
becomes the explanation of the individual's behavior,
and in one sense that's correct, but it is not the explana-
tion of why cultural systems are different from one an-
other. I didn't think that was the archaeologist's forte.
The units we work with are much more systemic in
character and are not strictly reducible to the actions of
individuals.
CR: It's curious, really, that the social anthropologists
moved away from so-called functionalism, where they
had some sections of the system as a whole, and in de-
veloping new insights—no doubt of great interest—they
do seem to have lost some of that earlier perception.
LB: You bet they have! Anthropology today is in worse
shape than it was when I was a student, in my opinion. It
has gone more and more into the relativist camp and
more and more into the weird humanism—”We're just
appreciating the glories of mankind in its variability"—
and nobody's trying to explain anything. The only real
69o I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
thing that's new, that's exciting, is the behavioral-
observation groups, and these are all working in a frame-
work of sociobiology, but they're doing good science.
They're really peripheral to the center—the ecological
center—of social anthropology today, which I find just
boring. I'd much rather read a good novel! Novelists
write better!
CR: And so you would put most of the literary creations
of Lévi-Strauss in that category?
LB: Oh, yes! He's terrible! Laborious to read! I'd much
rather read real science fiction.
CR: Now, let me go back to Britain at the time of the
Sheffield conference. Is it remarkable, do you think, that
there were very similar developments happening in Brit-
ain and America at the same time, as exemplified, for
instance, by analytical archaeology?
LB: The why question is not what I want to deal with.
I'll just make a couple of observations that I think condi-
tion things. When I leamed mathematics and statistics, I
leamed on a slide rule. The great breakthrough was a
hand-cranked calculator, on which it would take you
hours to do a six-by-six chi-square, so that actual pat-
tem-recognition work with numerical data was practi-
cally impossible. We knew how to do it, we knew the
mathematics, but just doing it was forbidding. Once we
got early computers, which in the modern sense were
pretty crude creatures in themselves, we could look for
patterns, and until we could begin to look for them there
was really no pay-off to making the data records. I mean,
why sit and piece-plot every stone if there's no way to
analyze it? Why describe in great detail the attributes or
whatever of pottery if there's no way of coping with it?
There was a whole domain of pattem-recognition work
that really wasn't accessible to the archaeologist at the
practical level until computers were available. This was
roughly coincidental with C14. Also, we had no practical
way of controlling the time, so that most of the argu-
ments—if you go back in the literature of the '4os and
'5os—were over how you inferred time from the ar-
chaeological record. Time is one of the things we want
to use as a control. Once you have some way of gaining
an independent assessment of elapsed time, then you've
got a totally different set of problems to focus upon—the
content of the archaeological record itself. These three
things coalesced. We had the hopes of an independent
chronological framework, we now had practical ways of
doing analysis with large data sets, and we could begin to
look around for ways to think about the archaeological
record in terms other than strict temporal ones. That, of
course, was what everybody had been trying to infer.
When I was a student, the only methodology—in the
sense of the science of method—that I was taught was
seriation.
CR: And that was because seriation not only was
chronologically directed but was one of the few things
that in fact did depend on pattems and upon manipulat-
ing pattems in a formal way.
LB: That's right. In a sense, once that problem was
solved, you could use the archaeological record for other
purposes, and you had ways of looking at it that could
yield patteming that was not obvious. This had to have
an enormous effect. I said to David [Clarke] in letters
many times that I used Analytical Archaeology but I
thought it was the best traditional archaeology book
ever written.
CR: He can't have been thrilled to bits to read that!
LB: He wasn't. Why did I say that? Because the entire
book was focusing on pattern-recognition work—which
I believed in—but it never questioned the basic premises
of traditional archaeology.
CR: It continued to formulate those questions.
LB: That's right. What I had been worrying about was
the basic premises of how to organize observations, and I
didn't see that he was worried about that at all. He was
just working right out of traditional archaeology and
bringing the new technology and the new methods to
the old paradigm. That's what I saw as the big difference
between what Clarke did and what we were doing.
CR: Right. Now, let's look for a moment at the divergen-
cies that developed in the immediate aftermath of the
New Archaeology. It seems to me that the clarity of
purpose of the early days wasn't altogether sustained.
There were interesting developments, but it didn't ad-
vance on all fronts.
LB: I'm not surprised at this, because traditional ar-
chaeology was a body of argument that had a series of
a prioris, a finite body of propositions about the world,
and once you became skeptical, you could go pretty
quickly through the list and show that they were either
right or wrong, useful or not useful. That was done, I
think, rather quickly. But then what did you put in its
place? We do reason from things that we think are secure
knowledge—now what was secure? There was no dis-
cussion, and there was no clear guide about how to do
productive research at the building level. So you had the
choosing of sides—"That's something that I believe"
and ”This is the way." You had a programmatic postur-
ing coming out of ecology, geography, sociobiology, or
someplace else, but there was not the fundamental in-
ductive research needed to put in place a strong altema-
tive to what was being knocked down. There was clear
inertia here; people didn't know what to do. I've talked
to colleagues who were very active in the '6os and then
by the middle '7os didn't know what to do. The common
response was, "I've got to get on with what I'm doing"
and "Well, we'll just do it this way," rather than trying
to figure out a research program that might be produc-
tive and following it. Whether what I've done is produc-

tive has to be decided by somebody else, but it does have
an integrated character that I'd thought through. I knew
we needed to know this, and this, and this, and we
needed to go back to the data and see what we needed to
know next. There's been that kind of a programmatic
character to what I've done. I think I've learned some-
thing. But I don't know that I can make many pro-
grammatic statements about substantive theory build-
ing in the field.
CR: In a sense, indeed, David Clarke's phrase "a loss of
innocence" is a sound one. In a way the New Archaeol-
ogy was as much a loss as a way of disposing of the
a prioris that could then be seen to be unsound, without
really having such a clear answer as to what happened
next.
LB: That's right. And that continues. I think that a lot of
the current arguments and positions are postures within
which there's no clear understanding of what is a pro-
ductive thing to do. Basically when I decide that I'm
going to try to do something, I like to try to integrate it
or at least try to do it in a way I haven't done it before;
then it's not boring to me.
CR: Let me tum now to the next stage. You decided,
"Right, I'm not going to learn much more by looking at
these Mousterian flints or bones, I'm going to take me
up to Alaska."
LB: I had in mind a number of things that I wanted to
leam. One thing was that here is a concrete situation in
which to investigate the degree to which a system is
intemally homogeneous. How much variability can you
expect to arise simply from differentially organized ac-
tivities of people across the landscape? But there was
more than that, because I wanted a way of monitoring
this in constant terms. Going back to the days of biol-
ogy, I'd been interested in ecology, but as long as you
have a typological approach to talking about environ-
ments, you're stuck. As long as the only way we could
talk about environments was whether they were oak or
hickory forests, we were stuck. We needed variables in
theory building, we needed to be able to talk about
biomass and tumover rates and productivity and the de-
gree to which environments differ in energetic terms.
CR: Nominal categories are not enough?
LB: Nominal categories are not enough. I was very anx-
ious to develop some way in which I could use the same
glasses and see all these variations. I wanted the glasses
to be something of relevance to archaeologists, so I
focused on bones. The reason for this was that I had done
a lot of work in the early days on lithics and couldn't
find any constraints. When you've got an animal, there
are certain properties of that animal that you can study,
and those properties are very likely to have also been
present in that animal in the past. I was trying to find
some kind of constant scale in terms of which the behav-
Volume 28, Number 5, December I987 I 69I
ioral variability of the system could be arrayed and made
visible. That was the methodological goal. The general
goal was that if I'm going to argue about what was going
on in Europe in Middle Pleistocene times, when there
was a periglacial setting in the Dordogne, it would be
very nice to know what a tundra was like. I had to put in
place knowledge anchors—things I could know from the
contemporary world that would also have been true for
the ancient world.
CR: So it would be logical to head north rather than
south?
LB: You bet! It was a decision that turned on general
educational criteria. There were some arguments still
lingering in the background that I wanted to look at
empirically, and there was a methodological goal. The
result was, I learned. The general educational goals were
met from that experience, much more than I had ever
imagined. Once I got there and began to look at the dif-
ferentiation of the system, I began to see all these
things—other than bones—that were behaving in inter-
esting ways, such as the organization of the technology.
This experience formed the basis for many of the articles
I've written about how gear is organized in different
ways—it didn't matter that the gear was aluminum
pans. The organizational principles were of great inter-
est, and I hadn't anticipated that at all. It was only after I
began to see the system through the bones that I could
begin to see all these activities as tied together in other
organizational ways. So the work up north was, in terms
of everything I've done since, fundamental. It really
changed how I thought and what I felt was worth doing
and what I thought it was important to try and keep
during excavation.
CR: Since then you haven't actually published much
about the Mousterian. There has been a pay-off that we
can talk about in earlier Paleolithic times, but the pay-
off to the Mousterian is not yet visible. Is that a fair
thing to say?
LB: Yes, but it will come. You see, when I went north I
was still trying to see the Mousterian as some kind of
watered-down fully modem human system. When I be-
gan to really work on the hunting-and-gathering stuff, I
asked first, "What's the range of variability on a global
scale?" and "How can we look at it from an organiza-
tional perspective as archaeologists?" As I began to see
that this was possible, that the variability was scaled
globally, what became clear to me was that the Mouste-
rian wasn't like us, that I was dealing with a domain of
organizational principles different from anything I could
see in any of the comparative work, even with modern
hunters and gatherers or with the Upper Palaeolithic.
That was very productive research and gives a good
background against which to work.
So, if the Mousterian's different from us—in a generic
sense—then we have to begin to look at these creatures
in a different way. At some point in the past they were
692] CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
animals. If I can't look at them from the standpoint of
human behavior and get anywhere, I'll simply go back
far enough in time for what we know about animal ecol-
ogy to be relevant and see what these characters were
before they were Mousterian. That was the strategy.
And that's now, I think, being quite successful. The
Mousterian is a transition between one kind of organiza-
tional principle and another, and with both ends begin-
ning to be somewhat clear, we can talk about it in more
interesting ways.
CR: I notice that in your more recent lectures you are
restricting the term "culture" essentially to post-
Mousterian phenomena. Whatever happened to man's
extrasomatic means of adaptation?
LB: Well, I think culture does that, but there are cer-
tainly other ways of doing that as well. We know now
that animals make tools—chimps cracking nuts and set-
ting up "tool caches" and all kinds of things—so tech-
nology, although it's not common in nature, can be orga-
nized in other than cultural terms. Early man may be
just the biggest example of that.
CR: "Culture" in your sense here involving symbolic
operations?
LB: That's right. It may have a lot to do with the appear-
ance of culture itself. So instead of culture's being part of
what you're explaining archaeologically, it may be par-
tially the explanation of culture itself that is needed. I
began to talk about the degree to which technology is in
fact central to an adaptation or is just a technical aid, an
adjunct to the behavor which is otherwise conditioned
by strict biological factors. I think we have to explore all
these things, because we don't know what brought cul-
ture into being. We can't solve this by a definition.
CR: Making fully modem man and his association with
culture in your sense seem so miraculous is far from
solving problems! Now you don't have it, now you do
have it—and is this not the hand of the Lord? Isn't that
almost what we've got back to? The Sistine Chapel ceil-
ing?
LB: No, I think not, Colin! There are several different
ways I could try to comment on that. If you look at the
problem of transition from a European perspective,
you're basically talking about a fairly short time period,
between, say, 44,000 and 34,000 B.P. On the other hand,
we've leamed more about sequences in other places in
the world. The archaeological sequences in Southern Af-
rica are provocative in that there are materials there that
seem to be greater than 50,000 and may be as much as
90,000 B.P. that have many of the properties of Upper
Palaeolithic assemblages from Europe. They may well be
there in Africa thousands of years before anything com-
parable appears in Europe. There are also provocative
presences of fossil material that is anatomically modern
and a lot older than anything anywhere else in the world.
If you're looking at the transition from a European per-
spective, it looks very quick, but if you begin to see
Europe as perhaps not where it happens in a processual
sense—that the transitions are going on in other places
of the world and we are in fact seeing a transition in
Europe that's radiationally based rather than indigenous-
change-based—then the problem becomes a little less
miraculous. That's Point Number I. Point Number 2,
even if it tums out that we have much more time to play
with, and it's not quite so miraculous, the character of
the changes is startling whenever they occur. The Lower
Palaeolithic basically lacks a whole series of things that I
think are quite indicative of human behavior in the
modem sense. Time depth is one of them. It's truly re-
markable to see a creature living in an environment with
salmon and reindeer (and we know they're there in
roughly the same ways they are in our world) and yet no
storage, no accumulation. When there are tremendous
aggregations of food, they go get a fish, eat it, and if they
get hungry, they'll get another one. They don't take 500
fish and put them up in storage and eat out of them.
There's little planning depth involved in that behavior,
and this is the kind of generalization that you can make
for almost everything from the Lower-Middle and Early-
Middle Palaeolithic. If you say, "OK, what is it that
makes planning depth possible?" Intelligence, yes.
There are many, many highly intelligent animals, and
they vary in their planning depth and they vary in other
things, but none of them come close to the scale that
we're capable of. When you tum to people who analyze
thought, what you get is very simple: once you can give
meaning to terms or to experiences, you can reason
through with the symbols—just as you do with cal-
culus—to anticipate events not yet experienced. Put an-
other way, you can abstract out of experiences things
that you think are relevant and reason in these
simplified terms to arrive at a condition that no one's yet
experienced. If you then experience it, your reasoning
process seems to have worked pretty well. Planning
depth is literally dependent upon the ability to antici-
pate events not yet in evidence, and what seems to be
nearly absent in all this early stuff is any planning depth
on that scale. When it occurs, when we begin to see it in
the archaeological record—bang! My guess is that this is
language. Now, I'm not saying that language in the
unique, human sense of language makes this possible.
I'm not saying you didn't have communication systems
before—all animals have them. I'm not saying they
weren't even efficient ones. I'm simply saying that they
didn't have the component of symboling that makes ab-
straction possible. Once you've got that, then the poten-
tial for dealing with the world in really different terms is
staggering. This is what the change is about. It is a major
change organizationally, from a behavioral standpoint. I
don't see any medium through which such a rapid
change could occur other than a fundamentally good,
biologically based communication system. And then lit-
erally an invention—we do it better.

CR: We do it better, but it's widely agreed by the
Chomskians, and so on, that we have these capacities.
We must be talking about the emergence, the develop-
ment of that capacity also, surely?
LB: Well, that's happening all along the way. The intelli-
gence is increasing, and probably communication skills
are increasing.
CR: But there isn't the same kind of explosive interac-
tion?
LB: I wouldn't strongly defend this, Colin, but I think
the patteming in the archaeological record is explosive.
The scale change in behavior is really dramatic. It's not
something that is gradual—in a Darwinian sense-
accumulating over a long period of time. Lots of things
are accumulating—increases in brain size, intelligence
probably, communication skills even, manufacturing
skills, the scale of involvement in technology, these are
all increasing gradually. But the change to fully modem
behavior in an organizational sense is not something
that happens gradually.
CR: It's a big punctuation mark.
LB: It is. And, you know, bad analogy perhaps, but if
we've got a great computer with an incredible memory
but we don't have the software, what do we do with it?
Once you start in the memory bank to analyze what's
stored, you're dependent upon an intellectual function, a
basic component of which is abstracting or, if you will,
filtering experience into "relevant" domains of informa-
tion.
CR: Now, in the framework where you like to speak of
explanation, you're very clear that culture is not its own
explanation. I imagine that language is not its own ex-
planation.
LB: I agree, but I have no competence in this area; at this
point I have to tum this over to someone who does brain
research and to psychologists. What I'm saying is that it
is germane for me to think about the problem. I'm not
claiming that I have an explanation at all.
CR: Right, that's very fair. Now, you have at times I
think—just in conversation—spoken about the possibil-
ity of doing work among the Bushmen.
LB: Well, in one sense I've done a lot of work among the
Bushmen, but I didn't have to do the work personally,
because I put students down there a long time ago.
CR: Right, right.
LB: I've been doing the facilitating for the students to do
the work, because although I continue to see the tremen-
dous advantage of continuing the hunter-gatherer work,
Volume 28, Number 5, December I987 I 693
I was just a little bit anxious to get back to the ar-
chaeological record.
CR: Which you have been doing on a global scale of late.
You were working in China for a while?
LB: Yes, in the summer of '85.
CR: And what did that achieve?
LB: This all had to do with looking at the very early time
period. Once I began to see patterning in one geographi-
cal place, it was quite interesting to find out whether the
same patteming that implicates organization in terms of
my argument is present or whether it varies from region
to region. Fully modem hunters and gatherers vary or-
ganizationally from environment to environment and
from one place to another. An initial impression that I
had was that the early hominids did not; the same or-
ganizational principles were present wherever you
looked at them. So I was quite anxious to look at the
Lower Palaeolithic and the earliest material appearing
in various regions to see whether there was subtle vari-
ability that could be mapped geographically or if they
were organizationally all alike in different settings. The
other problem was the radiation of early man. When you
start talking about the transition later, what you've al-
ways got to ask is, "OK, if you've got an early radiation
about 700,000—I,000,000 B.P., does everything thereafter
happen out of that parent population? Or is there a series
of radiations or gene-flow situations that is confusing
things at the periphery?" This is really hotly debated. I
wanted to see some of this material for myself. I had to
talk about it on a global scale. When you take the whole
world, there aren't very many sites that are really impor-
tant. We're just short of data. So that's one of the things
I've been trying to do—see most of it. Now, having done
much of that, I'm really anxious to start fieldwork at
Olduvai Gorge, because in the whole world there's not
quite a place like this, where you've got a chance to look
at not just little remnant deposits but whole landscapes
in cross-section, look at the variability of both palaeon-
tology and human remains, animal bones and stone
tools, across an ancient landscape. That kind of scale is
what's needed to test some of the behavioral and organi-
zational arguments?
CR: Right. Now, one or two more questions: one is the
hypothetical quiz-program question—if you were start-
ing over again now, which problems might you see of
interest to tackle, assuming we're still talking about the
world of archaeology? What I mean is, if you were a
research student now, choosing a research field, without
the investment that you have in various lines of
thought, what would be the challenging problems in ar-
chaeology?
2. The proposal for a grant to cover the costs of work at Olduvai
was not approved.
694 I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY
LB: Well, you know, I answer this two ways: If I had to
live my life over, I guess I'd do it just about the way I did
it. On the other hand, if I had known even part of what I
know now, I could have gone into the field with hunters
and gatherers in I9 5 6 and had a much richer set of oppor-
tunities than I had when I finally decided to do it in
I969.
CR: Because these opportunities are disappearing?
LB: If I had had the insight that I finally got in the late
'60s in the '50s, we'd have been a lot farther along. But
that's the hindsight business. Now I'll answer it a third
way. Given the range of problems that I think ar-
chaeologists have to face, what are the really important
areas that they haven't done much in? From the "sav-
age" side of the picture, as we tend to joke, we don't
know how to measure environments. We're still work-
ing with categorical kinds of approaches. This is a pine
forest and this is a this and this—we don't have good
variables. I've worried a bit with that, but I haven't pub-
lished it, so I can't make very good claims. On the other
hand, starting from the "civilized" side, your side, I
think the same problem exists, in that the researchers
think in terms of events, of categories of things, and they
haven't really figured out how to get variables that mon-
itor these systems. I think we're beginning to do that a
bit better in Palaeolithic work right now. From my side,
we need to do that for the environment; we're making
pretty good progress with the archaeology. From your
side, I think, whether or not you want to mess with the
environment is up to you, but certainly you have to do it
with the archaeological remains. We have to begin to
talk in terms of variables instead of events and catego-
ries.
CR: Right. I'm sure that's right, and of course the profu-
sion of data is such that it makes it harder sometimes.
LB: It makes it just horrible to think about. If you just
started saying, "I'm going to look at the pottery-
tremendous resource—we end up with 8 million pottery
types and I 5,000 different cultural provinces, and so on.
That doesn't help us. We have to begin to figure out
what we're going to monitor. We're going to monitor
what pots contain, the amount of social information
that they're carrying, some other things, and begin to
look at the scale of variations. That's sort of my "grand
statement" on the problem on a global scale!
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