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The Bordes-Binford Debate: Transatlantic Interpretative

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The Bordes-Binford Debate: Transatlantic Interpretative THE BORDES-BINFORD DEBATE: TRANSATLANTIC INTERPRETATIVE TRADITIONS IN PALEOLITHIC ARCHAEOLOGY by MELISSA CANADY WARGO Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Arlington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON August 2009 Copyright © by Melissa Canady Wargo 2009 All Rights Reserved ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have had the good fortune to be mentored in my academic and professional life by a few truly dedicated and generous souls. Dr. Frank Harrold, whose patience and kind nature is legendary, has had such a positive influence on my life -- I cannot thank him enough. Dr. Karl Petruso, an extraordinary scholar, has provided invaluable mentoring and advice to me over the years and I am so grateful for his current role on my dissertation committee. Dr. Steven Reinhardt is worthy of so many accolades. I so appreciate his patience and intellect as I have taxed the limits of what most students have likely asked of their dissertation advisors. Thank you! I would be most remiss if I did not extol the personal and professional virtues of Dr. Elisabeth Cawthon, who has a special talent for making each person in her orbit feel special and gifted. Her subtle, but insistent, prodding for me to just get this dissertation done was exactly what I needed, and for that I am most grateful. I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to several individuals at Western Carolina University who supported me in completing this dissertation. Dr. Kyle Carter gave me the gift of time; for all those Thursdays in the library, thank you. Drs. Carol Burton, Beth Lofquist, and AJ Grube, gave me the pep talks I needed when I was down. Their support has been invaluable. Finally, I wish to thank my family and friends. Donald Mitchell, in particular, knows what this accomplishment means to me. My parents, Earl and Cathy Canady, nurtured my love of education. I wish I could show them just how much I appreciate them. I am most grateful, however, to my husband, Steve Wargo, who deserves so much more than a thank you. Truly, I couldn’t have done this without him. Lastly, I would like to dedicate this work to my children, Shea and Fin. They are the reason I could not give up on seeing this task to the end. July 10, 2009 iii ABSTRACT THE BORDES-BINFORD DEBATE: TRANSATLANTIC INTERPRETATIVE TRADITIONS IN PALEOLITHIC ARCHAEOLOGY Melissa Canady Wargo, PhD. The University of Texas at Arlington, 2009 Supervising Professor: Dr. Steven G. Reinhardt In the 1960s, Lewis Binford, a young American archaeologist, challenged François Bordes, a venerable French prehistorian, over the interpretation of a taxonomy Bordes had developed to describe stone tools of the European Middle Paleolithic period (Mousterian). Ostensibly about the meaning of variability in Mousterian stone tool assemblages, the Bordes- Binford debate exposed a deep rift in the field of archaeology about how the deep past should be studied and interpreted. The intellectual clash has been cast subsequently in dichotomous terms: old versus young, descriptive versus explanatory, idiographic versus nomothetic, Old World versus New World. The Bordes-Binford debate, however, was not merely a singular event in the intellectual history of Paleolithic archaeology. It is the main thesis of this work that the Bordes-Binford debate is emblematic of the differing traditions within the discipline of archaeology as it was practiced by American and French scholars and that an understanding of the debate furthers understanding of how archaeology developed and is practiced and conceptualized in those countries today. To that extent, the Bordes-Binford debate is best understood in its transatlantic context; that is, it grew out of an encounter and exchange iv between protagonists who were profoundly influenced by their respective national and cultural experiences. The debate and its aftermath changed the practice of Paleolithic archaeology on both sides of the Atlantic. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ iii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................................... iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS............................................................................................................. viii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................ ix Chapter Page 1. INTRODUCTION……………………………………..………..…........................................ 1 1.1 The Literature ................................................................................................... 8 1.1.1 The Primary Literature ..................................................................... 9 1.1.2 The Secondary and Tertiary Literature .......................................... 12 2. THE FRENCH CONTEXT ............................................................................................ 26 2.1 Human Antiquity and the Notion of Cultural Evolution ................................... 26 2.2 Legacy of Lartet and Mortillet ......................................................................... 28 2.3 Court of Abbé Breuil (1905-1940) .................................................................. 34 2.4 The Postwar Years ......................................................................................... 38 3. THE AMERICAN CONTEXT ........................................................................................ 42 3.1 Evolutionary Archaeology and the Synthesis of Race (Mid-Late Nineteenth Century ........................................................................ 43 3.2 Culture-Historical Archaeology and the Concept of Culture (Pre-World War II) .......................................................................................... 48 3.3 Cracks in the Culture History Façade (Post World War II-1960) ................... 56 4. THE DEBATE ............................................................................................................... 66 4.1 Bordes’ Taxonomy ......................................................................................... 67 4.2 Bordes’ Interpretation of Mousterian Lithic Variability .................................... 72 4.3 A Frenchman in America ................................................................................ 73 vi 4.4 An American in France ................................................................................... 75 4.5 Binford and the Rise of the New Archaeology ............................................... 76 4.6 Binford’s Challenge of Bordes ........................................................................ 81 4.7 Bordes’ Response .......................................................................................... 87 4.8 Early Reaction to the Debate ......................................................................... 92 5. THE AFTERMATH (1970 to the Present) .................................................................... 98 5.1 Debating the Merits of Bordes’ and Binford’s Positions on Mousterian Variability ..................................................................................... 98 5.2 The Debate as a Clash of Paradigms? ........................................................ 103 5.2.1 The New World Tradition ............................................................. 107 5.2.2 The Old World Tradition ............................................................... 110 6. FRAMES OF REFERENCE FOR A NEW GENERATION ......................................... 122 6.1 The Bordes-Binford Debate from an American Perspective ........................ 123 6.2 The Bordes-Binford Debate from a French (European) Perspective ........... 127 6.3 Conclusion .................................................................................................... 133 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 137 BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ................................................................................................ 151 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 2.1 Mortillet’s Paleolithic Chronology, from Le Musée Préhistorique, 1881…………… 32 4.1 Cartoon presented to Lewis and Sally Binford by François Bordes and Pierre Laurent in 1968.……………………………………………………………. 90 viii LIST OF TABLES Table Page 4.1 Bordes’ Standard Type List, from Leçons sur le Paléolithique (1984)…… 70 4.2 Binford’s Summary of His Factor Analysis Juxtaposing His Functional Intepretation with Bordes’ Taxonomy (1966)….………………. 86 ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO THE BORDES-BINFORD DEBATE We shall try to set out the facts; but scientific facts are always more or less coloured by interpretation, and each man’s mind acts like a lens, which concentrates the rays according to its focus.1 François Bordes The archaeological record is static. It does not talk; it just sits there. It is contemporary. All my observations on the past; they are observations that I make in the present. And so if I am going to make any statements about the past, and those statements are about dynamics--are about events--then it is a problem of inference. And so the central problem is one of inference justification: not how to look but how to justify saying anything about what you have seen.2 Lewis Binford The history of archaeology,
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