Sally Binford

Sally Binford née Rosen (1924–1994) was an archaeologist. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish parents. A collection of interviews with Binford were published by Janet Clinger in a collection of interviews called "Our Elders, Six Bay Area Life Stories." In the interviews, Binford is reported as saying that her parents were racists, and one of her first realizations of this was when she had a crush on a Chinese boy at school in the second grade.

With her parents' urging, Binford started at Vassar College in 1942. In 1943, Binford quit against her parents' wishes. After working for two years, she decided to attend the University of Chicago undergraduate program. She was briefly married and had one child, Susan, before divorcing in 1950. In 1962 she completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in the department of anthropology, publishing on a survey of early prehistory in the Sahara. The faculty was all male and Binford felt that's she was not taken seriously and experienced gender discrimination as a female student and single mother.

Binford co-founded the processual archaeology movement, which aimed to make archaeology more scientific with explicit evidence and quantitative techniques. It also employed new technologies in a set of approaches towards archeological study. For example, Don S. Rice argues that this approach wanted to explain why historical events happened, rather than simply prove that they happened.^[1] Binford and her then-husband, Lewis Binford, co-founded the movement, however Binford was often denied credit for her involvement. Her challenge of François Bordes in the 1960s over his taxonomic description of ancient French stone tool assemblages from the Mousterian period lead to the Bordes-Binford Debate, which revealed the discrepancies in training and theory that are practiced by European and American archaeologists. The results of the debate drastically changed the practice of Paleolithic archaeology as it is practiced by both sides of the debate. She left both anthropology and Binford in 1969.^[2]

She became an important sexual liberation and feminist pioneer in the 1970s and 1980s. She was in a relationship with a woman, Jan, for several years, and published on feminist articles about both anthropology and modern politics.

At age 69, Binford arranged her own death to avoid becoming physically weak and dependent on others, an act she had planned at the age of 50.

References