Who’s Afraid of Sally Binford?

While the name Sally Binford means little to most people, saying the name “Binford” to an anthropologist or an archaeologist is its own kind of dog whistle. That’s because in the late 1960’s, Sally and Lewis Binford, her then-husband and colleague at the University of Chicago, were two key proponents of a radical paradigm shift in archaeology. In a series of articles and a book entitled New Perspectives in Archaeology, the Binfords were a driving force behind a movement known as “The New Archaeology.”