François Bordes and the Old Stone Age

This is a highly personal description of thecharacter and work of the great French archaeologist François Bordes, with whom Sackettworked for over twenty years. A native of France’s Perigord region, the prehistory ofwhich he explored for most of his career, Bordes regarded himself as a ‘journeyman fieldworker’ or ‘homme de terrain’. However his contributions to Palaeolithic archaeology hadan impact on the whole of the prehistory of Eurasia and beyond. This was the result ofhis innovative approaches to excavation and to the analysis of stone tool assemblages.Bordes participated in, and enjoyed debating the controversies between archaeologicalmethod and theory – and unfortunately, he also promoted factionalism within the Frencharchaeological community