ANTHROPOLOGY WITHOUT INFORMANTS Collected Works in Paleoanthropology by L. G. Freeman ANTHROPOLOGY WITHOUT INFORMANTS WITHOUT INFORMANTS Collected Works in Paleoanthropology by L. G. Freeman U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S O F COLOR A DO © 2009 by the University Press of Colorado Published by the University Press of Colorado 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C Boulder, Colorado 80303 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of the Association of American University Presses. The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metro- politan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Freeman, Leslie G. Anthropology without informants : collected works in paleoanthropology / by L. G. Freeman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87081-947-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Paleolithic period—Spain. 2. Anthropology, Prehistoric—Spain. 3. Paleoanthropology—Spain. 4. Antiquities, Prehistoric—Spain. 5. Freeman, Leslie G.—Literary collections. I. Title. GN772.22.S7F74 2009 936.6—dc22 2009004090 Design by Daniel Pratt An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched. KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open access ISBN for this book is 978-1-60732-706-6. More information about the initiative and links to the open-access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org. In memoriam F. Clark Howell (1927–2007), who knew everything about the past and its most important investigators almost without excep- tion. He tried his best to teach me to be a professional prehisto- rian, and I owe whatever I have accomplished to him, though I never came close to being a professional of his caliber. Sit tibi terra levis. Contents Foreword ix Preface xv I. TOWARD A WORKING THEORY 1 1. Anthropology without Informants (1977) 5 2. A Theoretical Framework for Interpreting Archeological Materials (1968) 19 3. The Fat of the Land (Partial) (1981) 29 II. AN OVERVIEW OF THE PaLEOLITHIc 41 4. By Their Works You Shall Know Them: Cultural Developments in the Paleolithic (1975) 45 5. Paleolithic Polygons: Voronoi Tesserae and Settlement Hierarchies in Cantabrian Spain (1994) 73 vii viii CONTENTS III. THE LOWER PaLEOLITHIc 87 6. Torralba and Ambrona: A Review of Discoveries (1994) 89 7. Were There Scavengers at Torralba? (2001) 141 IV. THE MIDDLE PaLEOLITHIc 159 8. Kaleidoscope or Tarnished Mirror? Thirty Years of Mousterian Investigations in Cantabria (1994) 161 9. The Mousterian, Present and Future of a Concept (A Personal View) (2006) 197 10. Research on the Middle Paleolithic in the Cantabrian Region (2005) 213 V. PaLEOLITHIC ART 237 11. Meanders on the Byways of Paleolithic Art (1987) 241 12. The Many Faces of Altamira (1994) 277 13. Techniques of Figure Enhancement in Paleolithic Cave Art (1987) 295 14. The Cave as Paleolithic Sanctuary (2005) 315 15. Caves and Art: Rites of Initiation and Transcendence (2005) 329 VI. THE BENEFITS OF COOPERATION 343 16. The Participation of North Americans and Spaniards in Joint Prehistoric Research in Cantabria (2006) 345 Afterword 359 Permissions 363 Index 367 Foreword This volume encapsulates some of the most significant published work of Leslie G. Freeman, an important—and, I believe, underappreciated—figure in the history of American participation in the study of Paleolithic Europe. Leslie Freeman entered this field in the 1960s, a time of intellectual turmoil and important developments in the history of archeology. First came the rise of the movement in American anthropological archeology that came to be known as the “New Archeology.” Led by the charismatic Lewis Binford, a network of relatively junior archeologists challenged prevailing orthodoxy in advancing new claims. They argued that archeology properly was—or should be—a science, and one that prom- ised reliable knowledge of the prehistoric past through careful application of scien- tific method. Furthermore, since the various aspects of culture were part of an inter- related, systemic whole, information was potentially retrievable about all aspects of past sociocultural systems, including social organization and ideology, that had been conventionally regarded as more or less inaccessible to investigation. Suddenly, the scope of archeological investigation was seen as greatly broadened. The second notable development was that of the concept—especially associ- ated with Freeman’s mentor, F. Clark Howell—of paleoanthropology. Howell con- ceptualized the study of human evolution not as an exotic subfield of paleontology ix x FOREWORD but as the multifaceted anthropological study of human biological and cultural evo- lution. All subfields of anthropology had contributions to make to this endeavor (although that of linguistics was admittedly limited because of the paucity of direct evidence of ancient languages before the emergence of writing). In Howell’s view, archeology and even sociocultural anthropology had vital contributions to make to understanding the behavior of the ancient hominins who left behind Paleolithic archeological sites. Finally, Freeman’s intellectual formation coincided with the first large-scale involvement of American archeologists with Paleolithic prehistory, especially in Europe. American archeologists had always worked largely in the New World, oc- cupying themselves with the relatively narrow slice of the human past represented by occupation of the New World (the last 10,000–20,000 years or so). In the wake of a handful of pioneers like Hallam Movius (whose Old World fieldwork experience long antedated World War II), a new generation of archeologists chose to work with the deep archeological record of the Old World Paleolithic. Archeological de- posits in Europe date back tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and the older parts of that record were left by hominins that were notably different skeletally from anatomically modern humans. For these early humans, one could not neces- sarily assume cultural capabilities and adaptations comparable to those of recent hunter-gatherers. This was an issue not faced by New World researchers. Enabled by postwar prosperity and a great expansion of U.S. higher education and research funding, this group began to put an American stamp on Paleolithic research. James Sackett, Harvey Bricker, Sally Binford, Alison Brooks, Leslie Freeman, and Richard Klein, among others, began to come to grips with the complexity and depth of the Paleolithic archeological record, as well as its interpretations by their European col- leagues, who, as Freeman details in this volume, came from quite a different intellec- tual tradition from the American one. The most dramatic consequent confrontation of this period was between François Bordes and Lewis Binford over the interpreta- tion of stone tool variability in the Mousterian industry (generally associated with the Neandertals). However, for the most part, the Euro-American encounter was quieter, thoughtful, and sustained, and resulted in many long-term and mutually beneficial research collaborations. Leslie Freeman was a busy participant in these intellectual developments. His mentor, Clark Howell, who persuaded him to eschew socio-cultural anthropology for paleoanthropology, introduced him to Paleolithic fieldwork at Torralba and Ambrona in Spain. Freeman’s period as a graduate student also coincided with Lewis Binford’s tempestuous tenure on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Binford’s sense of the exciting possibilities of a rigorously scientific archeology had a clear in- fluence on Freeman. Freeman’s choice of a doctoral dissertation topic—Mousterian lithic variability in Cantabrian Spain—resonated with Binford’s enthusiasm for apply- ing new analytical tools and scientific method to problems in traditional prehistory. After Freeman’s initial research experience with Howell on the Spanish Meseta, he moved to the archeologically rich region of Cantabria in north-central Spain for his dissertation on Mousterian lithic variability. This area has since remained the geo- graphic focus of his research, although he worked in Catalunya at Abric Agut in the 1970s and returned to Ambrona with Howell in the 1980s. In the course of his career, Freeman has had sustained research collaborations with several colleagues (notably Howell, Richard Klein, and Karl Butzer), but none was as durable as his decades-long collaboration with the eminent Spanish prehistorian Joaquín González Echegaray, with whom he worked on two long-term cave excavation projects at Cueva Morín (with Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic deposits) and el Juyo (Upper Paleolithic) and numerous publications. To a greater degree than many U.S.-based researchers, Freeman became a regu- larly contributing member of the Spanish Paleolithic research community. He and his wife, the distinguished socio-cultural anthropologist Susan Tax Freeman, have long maintained a home in Santander, where they have spent extended periods. Unlike