I was born on October 4, 1947, in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. My father, Louie Schiffer (1918-2007), raised chickens on a small farm with his parents and numerous siblings. Also a Canadian, my mother, Frances-Fera Schiffer (1925-2008), was born in Toronto, Ontario. Following other members of the large Schiffer clan, the Louie Schiffer family immigrated to Los Angeles, California, in 1953, seeking warm weather and fortunes to be made in the land of sun, surf, and orange groves. Regrettably, no fortune was made, but I did have a happy--almost idyllic--childhood. My parents provided a loving and supportive home in which I was encouraged to be creative and pursue my interests.
I attended Audubon Junior High School and Dorsey High School, both in the Crenshaw area of what is now called "south-central" Los Angeles. It was a marvelous place for a teenager to mature, a lower middle-class neighborhood that had considerable ethnic diversity long before forced busing. At Dorsey High School, I took lots of math and science classes, intent on becoming an electrical engineer or chemist.
Schiffer (far right) at Vernon, Arizona 1968.
After graduation from Dorsey in June, 1965, I matriculated at the University of California at Los Angeles, following in the footsteps of my cousin, Dr. Lawrence H. Lazarus, where I majored in chemistry. As a sophomore, seeking wider horizons, I changed majors to anthropology, and eventually took courses in archaeology from James N. Hill, Sally R. Binford, James Sackett, and Lewis R. Binford. In my junior year I decided on a career in archaeology.
In the summer of 1968, I participated in the Field Museum of Natural History's Southwest Expedition, based in the hamlet of Vernon, Arizona. There I came to know the Expedition's Director, Paul Sydney Martin, and its senior staff, Fred Plog, Mark Leone, and Ezra Zubrow. It was an interesting mix of personalities.
Although receiving generous fellowship offers from UCLA, Michigan, and Arizona, I decided to attend the latter for graduate school. During the summers of 1969-71, I returned to Vernon, eventually gathering dissertation data from the Joint Site, a 36-room pueblo, excavated jointly with John Hanson, David Gregory, and Fred Gorman. Many rumors abound about how this site was named; some are true.
In graduate school I took archaeology courses from William A. Longacre, T. Patrick Culbert, and Emil Haury, but Raymond H. Thompson chaired my dissertation committee. I interacted most with fellow graduate students J. Jefferson Reid, James T. Rock, Mark Harlan, David R. Wilcox, Michael Collins, and Henri Luebbermann II, as well as with new faculty member William L. Rathje. It was out of this group that the rudiments of behavioral archaeology emerged.
Excavating in the Cache River Basin, Arkansas, 1974.
"Behavioral archaeology" meant many things to many people then, just as it does now. It was a perspective intended to reintegrate a discipline seemingly going off in all directions (just look at the papers in American Antiquity during the early 1970s). As a theoretical program, it privileges behavior--what people actually do, recognizing that all behavior (defined as activities) consists of people-artifact interactions. Also implied is an interest in the life histories of artifacts, whether one represents these as flow models or activities in behavioral chains. Behavioral archaeology also strives to understand and take into account, in archaeological inference, all relevant cultural and noncultural formation processes of the archaeological record.
My doctoral dissertation, a hasty effort cobbled together--a bricoleur's work, some might say--in less than a year, was defended on August 14, 1973. The next day Annette and I moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I took up a position doing contract projects with the Arkansas Archeological Survey. It took me several months to understand that "soft money" meant I would be on the job market again soon. Working with Hester Davis, Charles R. McGimsey, and others, I came to appreciate the complexities of trying to build into all contract projects considerations of modern method and theory. The Cache River Archeological Project (CRAP) consumed my first year at Arkansas; much smaller projects, revising my dissertation, and job hunting the second.
I was fortunate to receive an offer from the University of Arizona, where I had always longed to return. I took up the position of Assistant Professor in August, 1975. Immensely pleased with this turn of events, I did not even negotiate my salary--a mistake for which I am still paying.
In the field, Northern Chile, 1985
The Reuse Project, an ethnoarchaeological study of reuse processes in Tucson, was my first major undertaking at Arizona. In 1979 I was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Also in 1979 I began preparing, with Randall H. McGuire, an archaeological overview of southwestern Arizona for the Bureau of Land Management. William L. Rathje and I started