LEWIS R. BINFORD AND AMBER L. JOHNSON The organizers of this volume have
brought together authors who have worked on local sequences, much as
traditional archaeologists tended to do, however, with the modern goal
of addressing evolutionary change in hunter-gatherer systems over long
time spans. Given this ambitious goal they wisely chose to ask the
authors to build their treatments around a focal question, the utility
of the forager-eollector continuum (Binford 1980) for research on
archaeological sequences. Needless to say, Binford was flat- tered by
their choice and understandably read the papers with a great deal of
interest. When he was asked to write the foreword to this provoca- tive
book he expected to learn new things and in this he has not been
disappointed. The common organizing questions addressed among the
contributors to this volume are simply, how useful is the
forager-eollector continuum for explanatory research on sequences, and
what else might we need to know to explain evolutionary change in
hunter-gatherer adaptations? Most sequences document systems change, in
some sense. Though we don't necessarily know how much synchronous
systemic variability there might have been relative to the documented
sequence, most authors have tried to address the problem of within
systems variability. In this sense, most are operating with
sophistication not seen among traditional culture historians. The
primary problem for archaeologists of the generation prior to Binford
was how to date archaeological materials.
