© Southern Methodist UniversityLewis R. Binford, a founding proponent of the so-called new archaeology movement.
Lewis R. Binford, one of the most influential American archaeologists of the last half-century and an early advocate of a more scientific approach to investigating ancient cultures, died on April 11 at his home in Kirksville, Mo. He was 79.
The cause was cardiac arrest brought on by congestive heart failure, said his wife, Amber Johnson.
A founding proponent of the so-called new archaeology movement, Dr. Binford was once described by
Scientific American magazine as "quite probably the most influential archaeologist of his generation." From his base, first at the University of New Mexico and then at Southern Methodist University, he took to the field in Alaska, Australia and Africa, studying living hunters and gatherers to better understand similar societies that had existed in the past.
It was as a young assistant professor at the University of Chicago in 1962 that Dr. Binford tossed a stone into archaeology's waters and watched the ripples expand from shore to shore. That year his article in the journal
American Antiquity, "Archaeology as Anthropology," proposed that his colleagues move beyond an emphasis on cataloging artifacts and looking for museum pieces and concentrate on a broad scientific analysis of what their excavations tell of how ancient people lived, the commoners as well as the elite.
Soon Dr. Binford's contemporaries and then a wider number of researchers joined the forces of the new archaeology, now known as processual archaeology, in which many branches of science are brought to bear in studying the behaviors and processes of past societies.
