James Sackett

• University of California, Los Angeles

Boucher de Perthes (1788-1868) is a well-known scholar and his biography, thanks to the pioneering works of Léon Aufrère, offers a better understanding of the tension between his social origins and his intellectual work. James Sackett’s contribution, a specialist of French Paleolithic and a historian of the discipline himself, aims at clarifying th...

This is a highly personal description of the character and work of the great French archaeologist François Bordes, with whom Sackett worked for over twenty years. A native of France’s Perigord region, the prehistory of which he explored for most of his career, Bordes regarded himself as a ‘journeyman field worker’ or ‘homme de terrain’. However his...

Why did Boucher de Perthes’ discoveries of handaxes in the Somme River’s gravels need to be verified by English geologist Joseph Prestwich, and antiquarian John Evans, before members of the French Academy of Sciences changed their minds about evidence for the antiquity of humanity? The problem was not with the evidence itself, but with the way Bouc...

The general utility of r-mode factor analyses for screening and ordering artifact characteristics is severely restricted by the presence of nominal categories in typological attribute systems. Even where a correlation coefficient appropriate to qualitative data can be used, factor analysis generates spurious correlations stemming from the interdepe...

Exploring the dynamics of typological patterning in stone tools requires analytic approaches for quantitatively manipulating attributes. Building upon the work of A. Spaulding, the present author, and many others, this paper outlines one such approach based upon contingency table analysis, which is designed to meet the needs of the practicing lithi...

Neanderthal Behaviour:the Archaeological Evidence - Volume 7 Issue 1 - James Sackett

Le Tas de Beaufort est un amas de galets et de silex decouvert sur le Plateau Parrain a quelque 40 metres du fond de tente magdalenien fouille en 1960. Les galets (gres, dolentes et surtout quartz) sont presque tous fractures et rubefies. Le materiel en silex (Magdalenien moyen probable) est caracterise par un outillage ou predominent les burins et...

The literature of style and ethnicity in archaeology exhibits growing confusion regarding the meaning of the term isochrestism introduced by Sackett. Its original, and correct, usage concerns the notion that ethnic style is a latent quality that potentially resides in all formal variation in material culture, including varition regarded as purely f...

Binford's characterization of the isochrestic model of style seriously misrepresents it, particularly with regard to the assemblage variability problem. Here his criticisms are answered, the real argument of the model reviewed, and the reasons for his misrepresentation explored. It may be pertinent to the latter that the model has been presented in...

Wiessner's analysis of stylistic variation in San arrows entails valuable ethnoarchaeological observation and insight. But her evidence contradicts the iconological theory she imposes upon it, whereby San artisans are thought to purposefully invest their products with ethnic symbolism in order to transmit social information to various target popula...

A key issue in lithic archaeology is how to identify the respective roles played by ethnicity and activity—that is, style and function—in the formal variation exhibited by stone tools. This paper argues that style is most profitably regarded as the ethnic idiom imparted to lithic technology in each and all of its aspects due to the culture-historic...

To frame a model of style valid for archaeology in the general case it is necessary to begin by stripping away all the specialized connotations the word has assumed until there only remain the fundamental tenets without which the essence of the matter would itself dissolve and escape. It is never easy to feel that one has reached the bottom of thin...

Review of Prehistory, by Derek Roe; Aspects of Prehistory, by Grahame Clark; World Prehistory, by Grahame Clark; Introductory Readings in Archaeology, by Brian M. Fagan, ed.; The Origins of Civilization, by Carroll L. Riley; The Archaeology of Early Man, by J. M. Coles and E. S. Higgs; Shipwrecks and Archaeology, by Peter Throckmorton; A History of...