ABSTRACT
In recent years Richard Gould has regularly been addressing the field of archaeology with a number of programmatic suggestions. I consider these ideas to be poorly thought out yet seemingly seductive to those who wish to avoid the basic intellectual issues facing archaeology as a science. I began to criticize Gould (Binford 1979) when I realized that his easy, stylistically soft form of rhetoric was being taken seriously by students and some teachers. In a recent analysis of Gould’s positions I advanced the view (Binford 1985a) that the basic assumptions from which Gould operated were strict empiricists’ ideas of science (a point that Gould 1985 has now conceded), but that at the same time he paradoxically adopted an idealist approach when seeking explanations for culture and therefore history. Gould states,
It may be precisely those aspects of human behavior that prove least susceptible to measurement and scientific analysis that could prove, in the end, to be the most decisive. Could it be that the more restrictively quantitative archaeology tries to become, the more trivial it becomes, too? (Gould 1980a:38; emphasis added)
