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ISSN 1989-4104 |
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ISSN 1989-4104 |
 48.1 KBAlice Beck Kehoe • español
Abstract. This essay looks at the late Lewis Binford’s career from the standpoint of sociology of science.
His thinking and manner reflect his socialization in Virginia Baptist subculture. As convinced of his authority on science as Jerry Falwell was of his authority on Biblical morality, Lewis Binford and his third wife Sally Rosen Binford excited a group of 1960s students to follow Lewis in an outmoded version of science (hypothetico-deductive) and in trusting statistics.
The “frames of reference” he laboriously constructed are naïve on environmental interpretation and, because he expressed contempt for “political” aspects of archaeology, fail to take into account effects of colonialism. His work is often scientistic, in the “modern” mode that historian Dorothy Ross describes as characteristic of twentieth-century American social sciences.
Keywords: Lewis Binford, biography, processual archaeology.
Alice Beck Kehoe (akehoe@uwm.edu) (Barnard ’56, Harvard Ph.D. ’64) has carried out archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork in Montana and Saskatchewan and in Bolivia.
With her husband Thomas F. Kehoe, she excavated three major bison pounds and investigated the Moose Mountain “medicine wheel” astronomical observatory, Saskatchewan, dated to late first millennium B.C.E. (this in collaboration with astrophysicist John Eddy), and with her own crew excavated François’ House, an early fur trade post.
In Bolivia she assisted her former student Alan L. Kolata on Tiwanaku raised field reconstruction with Aymara.
She works with Blackfoot and Cree First Nations, and in history of archaeology and analyses of theory and method in archaeology. She has held office in American Anthropological Association, Central States Anthropological Society, Archaeological Institute of America-Milwaukee Society, and on Society for American Archaeology committees.
How to cite this publication:
Kehoe, A. B. 2011. Lewis Binford and his moral majority. Arqueología Iberoamericana 10: 8-16. http://www.laiesken.net/arqueologia/archivo/2011/10/3_en. Publication date: 30-6-2011.
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