Michael schiffer autobiography

Michael Brian Schiffer (born October 4, , in Winnipeg, Canada) is an American archaeologist and one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology.^[1]

Schiffer's earliest ideas, set out in his book Behavioral Archeology and many journal articles, are mainly concerned with the formation processes of the archaeological record (cultural and noncultural).

His most important early contribution to archaeology was the rejection of the common processualist assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of actual ancient societies. He argues that artifacts and sites undergo, respectively post-use and post-occupational modification by diverse formation processes.

In his American Antiquity article Schiffer, using flow models, explained that artifacts generally pass through numerous social contexts of procurement, manufacture, use, recycling, and disposal and that the same kind of artifact can enter the