Foreword

This volume encapsulates some of the most significant published work of Leslie G. Freeman, an important—and, I believe, underappreciated—figure in the history of American participation in the study of Paleolithic Europe.

Leslie Freeman entered this field in the 1960s, a time of intellectual turmoil and important developments in the history of archeology. First came the rise of the movement in American anthropological archeology that came to be known as the “New Archeology.” Led by the charismatic Lewis Binford, a network of relatively junior archeologists challenged prevailing orthodoxy in advancing new claims. They argued that archeology properly was—or should be—a science, and one that promised reliable knowledge of the prehistoric past through careful application of scientific method. Furthermore, since the various aspects of culture were part of an interrelated, systemic whole, information was potentially retrievable about all aspects of past sociocultural systems, including social organization and ideology, that had been conventionally regarded as more or less inaccessible to investigation. Suddenly, the scope of archeological investigation was seen as greatly broadened.

The second notable development was that of the concept—especially associated with Freeman’s mentor, F. Clark Howell—of paleoanthropology. Howell conceptualized the study of human evolution not as an exotic subfield of paleontology but as the multifaceted anthropological study of human biological and cultural evolution. All subfields of anthropology had contributions to make to this endeavor (although that of linguistics was admittedly limited because of the paucity of direct evidence of ancient languages before the emergence of writing). In Howell’s view, archeology and even sociocultural anthropology had vital contributions to make to understanding the behavior of the ancient hominins who left behind Paleolithic archeological sites.

Finally, Freeman’s intellectual formation coincided with the first large-scale involvement of American archeologists with Paleolithic prehistory, especially in Europe. American archeologists had always worked largely in the New World, occupying themselves with the relatively narrow slice of the human past represented by occupation of the New World (the last 10,000–20,000 years or so). In the wake of a handful of pioneers like Hallam Movius (whose Old World fieldwork experience long antedated World War II), a new generation of archeologists chose to work with the deep archeological record of the Old World Paleolithic. Archeological deposits in Europe date back tens and hundreds of thousands of years, and the older parts of that record were left by hominins that were notably different skeletally from anatomically modern humans. For these early humans, one could not necessarily assume cultural capabilities and adaptations comparable to those of recent hunter-gatherers. This was an issue not faced by New World researchers. Enabled by postwar prosperity and a great expansion of U.S. higher education and research funding, this group began to put an American stamp on Paleolithic research. James Sackett, Harvey Bricker, Sally Binford, Alison Brooks, Leslie Freeman, and Richard Klein, among others, began to come to grips with the complexity and depth of the Paleolithic archeological record, as well as its interpretations by their European colleagues, who, as Freeman details in this volume, came from quite a different intellectual tradition from the American one. The most dramatic consequent confrontation of this period was between François Bordes and Lewis Binford over the interpretation of stone tool variability in the Mousterian industry (generally associated with the Neandertals). However, for the most part, the Euro-American encounter was quieter, thoughtful, and sustained, and resulted in many long-term and mutually beneficial research collaborations.

Leslie Freeman was a busy participant in these intellectual developments. His mentor, Clark Howell, who persuaded him to eschew socio-cultural anthropology for paleoanthropology, introduced him to Paleolithic fieldwork at Torralba and Ambrona in Spain. Freeman’s period as a graduate student also coincided with Lewis Binford’s tempestuous tenure on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Binford’s sense of the exciting possibilities of a rigorously scientific archeology had a clear influence on Freeman. Freeman’s choice of a doctoral dissertation topic—Mousterian lithic variability in Cantabrian Spain—resonated with Binford’s enthusiasm for applying new analytical tools and scientific method to problems in traditional prehistory.

After Freeman’s initial research experience with Howell on the Spanish Meseta, he moved to the archeologically rich region of Cantabria in north-central Spain for his dissertation on Mousterian lithic variability. This area has since remained the geographic focus of his research, although he worked in Catalunya at Abric Agut in the 1970s and returned to Ambrona with Howell in the 1980s. In the course of his career, Freeman has had sustained research collaborations with several colleagues (notably Howell, Richard Klein, and Karl Butzer), but none was as durable as his decades-long collaboration with the eminent Spanish prehistorian Joaquín González Echegaray, with whom he worked on two long-term cave excavation projects at Cueva Morín (with Mousterian and Upper Paleolithic deposits) and el Juyo (Upper Paleolithic) and numerous publications.

To a greater degree than many U.S.-based researchers, Freeman became a regularly contributing member of the Spanish Paleolithic research community. He and his wife, the distinguished socio-cultural anthropologist Susan Tax Freeman, have long maintained a home in Santander, where they have spent extended periods. Unlike most of his counterparts, Freeman was not an annual participant at the meetings of the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association, but he frequently lectured and presented papers at meetings in Spain and other countries. His network of Spanish colleagues and collaborators is extensive. Although he has published in the most highly regarded U.S. journals (including American Anthropologist and American Antiquity), about one-third of his research publications are in Spanish outlets. This laudable involvement in the Spanish research community, I believe, had the effect of diminishing somewhat his visibility in Anglophone research circles. Perhaps most significant in this respect is that the monographic publications of his two long-term cave excavation projects (Cueva Morín and el Juyo) have been in Spanish, limiting access among English-language scholars. Furthermore, as of this writing, Howell’s and Freeman’s work at Torralba and Ambrona has not yet seen final monographic publication—a fact that has doubtless contributed to the controversy and misconceptions over interpretation of the sites about which Freeman writes in this volume.

Leslie Freeman’s institutional base during nearly his entire career was the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, where after receiving his Ph.D. in 1964, he returned in 1965 as a faculty member, during Clark Howell’s effort to build a nucleus of paleoanthropological researchers. After Howell’s departure for Berkeley in 1970, Freeman, along with Karl Butzer and Richard Klein, formed the “stones and bones” contingent with Paleolithic interests among the anthropology faculty. Freeman and his colleagues trained a number of students who went on to careers in Paleolithic research, including Geoffrey Clark, Margaret Conkey, Lawrence Straus, Thomas Volman, James Pokines, Heather Stettler, and myself. Butzer and Klein left Chicago in the 1980s, and unfortunately, were not replaced by faculty with Paleolithic interests. The Department of Anthropology had decided to reorient its archeological research interests toward early complex societies. When Freeman retired in 2000, the distinguished history of Paleolithic research at Chicago came to an end. As several chapters in this volume show, Freeman has remained an active scholar since his retirement. In addition to emeritus status in Chicago’s Department of Anthropology, he has institutional affiliations with Montana State University and with the Instituto para Investigaciones Prehistóricas in Santander, which he cofounded.

The pieces collected in this volume represent a sampling of Freeman’s thought and writing over more than forty years and touch on many subjects. They reveal several recurring and important issues that have occupied him over the years. One issue is that of human agency in the accumulation of excavated deposits from the deep past of the Lower Paleolithic, especially at sites like Torralba and Ambrona. In such cases, we cannot be sure that our ancient subjects behaved in ways that correspond to the behavior of any ethnographically known human groups. What role then can ethnographic analogy play? Interpretations of the hominin behavior that produced the arrangements of mammal bones and stone tools at Torralba and Ambrona have varied greatly—from depictions of human predators able to conduct well-planned elephant hunts to those of human scavengers quite incapable of hunting mammals of any size. Freeman has always been concerned with careful interpretation of patterning in all relevant prehistoric data that can be demonstrated to exist through replicable, appropriate statistical methods. He has not shied away from controversy, as his discussions of Lewis Binford’s interpretations in Chapters 6 and 7 show. But his emphasis has always been not on personalities, but on the best ways of tackling the inherently thorny problems of interpreting the Lower Paleolithic record.

The study of faunal remains for information about ancient subsistence and diet is another recurring theme in Freeman’s research and is treated in Chapter 3. Freeman’s concern is with reliably separating what we can and do know about these complex ancient systems from what we do not, and perhaps cannot, know. As he notes, these sources of “noise” in the archeological record are not always recognized and accounted for in the archeological literature.

Two further issues closely linked in Freeman’s writings are the interpretation of Mousterian lithic variability (see Chapters 8–10) and the appropriate use of statistical methods, in archeology generally and in lithic analysis particularly. Freeman’s doctoral research involved him closely with the stone implements of the Cantabrian region and showed him that Bordes’s scheme of four Mousterian “facies” defined in southwestern France did not fit Cantabria well. Eventually, he was able to demonstrate that the kind of lithic variation Bordes measured was in fact not parsed into four discontinuous facies but varied continuously among assemblages. As he notes in his preface to this volume, Freeman learned while in the utilities industry, and again in the army, the importance of carefully measuring variables relevant to the problem at hand and manipulating the data with quantitative methods carefully selected for appropriateness given the nature of the data. He never forgot this lesson in his analyses of archeological data.

Finally, Paleolithic art, especially cave art, has been an important research concern of Freeman’s since the 1980s. Initially reluctant to enter a field so characterized by highly speculative theories about ancient religion and systems of thought, Freeman came to find it amenable to careful, systematic investigation. As Chapters 11–15 indicate, painstaking observation and data collection can both disconfirm simplistic theories and reveal interesting patterning in the data that had not been recognized. His careful use of ethnographic and historical information, and of data on the biology and behavior of the animals depicted in cave art, has opened new perspectives in this field.

This volume gives the reader a good appreciation for the range and depth of the scientific contributions of Leslie Freeman. It can only hint at the personal characteristics that have made knowing and working with Les such a rewarding experience for me and many others. The range of his intellectual curiosity is impressive—from ethnography to photogrammetry, from Romanesque art to big-game hunters’ accounts of animal behavior. Les is always finding material in unlikely corners that can help illuminate the study of the Paleolithic. His enthusiasm is almost boyish for new statistical or field methods and new gadgets that might improve how archeology is done. And his sometimes outrageous sense of humor, heightened by a prodigious memory for limericks and song lyrics, has brightened many an afternoon of excavation. Leslie Freeman’s contributions to the study of the Paleolithic have been considerable, and this volume is an excellent introduction to them.

—FRANCIS B. HARROLD

DEAN, COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, AND PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY

ST. CLOUD STATE UNIVERSITY