SUNY Binghamton: The Second Wave of the New Archaeology in the 1970s and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the 1970s a group of archaeologists from the University of Chicago began their early teaching careers in the graduate Anthropology Program at SUNY-Binghamton. These professors included Margaret Conkey, John Fritz, Fred Plog,and Charles Redman. Their graduate students referred to them as “the second wave of the New Archaeology.” At the same time Fred Plog and Margaret Wiede initiated a major CRM highway project.I-88. The SUNY-Binghamton Public Archaeology Facility became a leading Northeastern training program for MA and PhD students specializing in CRM. Albert Ammerman arrived soon after he co-authored a series of papers on the demic diffusion of early Neolithic villages with population geneticist Luigi Cavalli-Sforza. Adding to this, William Isbell led a major project in Peru at Tiwanaku. The archaeologists at Binghamton covered several major world regions while emphasizing the tenets of American processual archaeology: nomothetic-deductive hypothesis testing, quantitative methods, research design, cultural ecology, diachronic change, gender relations, and cultural resource management. In this paper I trace my own career trajectory back to my graduate training as a prehistorian and ethnoarchaeologist in North America, the Mediterranean, and Central Asia. Binghamton’s graduate program left a lasting legacy of processualism and beyond in the 70s and 80s.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51087