L. G. Freeman: An Appreciation

LESLIE GORDON ("LES") FREEMAN, born in September 1935, is a product of the University of Chicago, both as an undergraduate and, ultimately, as a graduate student in Anthropology. After his baccalaureate, he worked three years as an engineer in New York, his birth state, and then served a two-year hitch in the U.S. Army in a topographic survey unit. I first met him as he entered graduate school (1959), where he was initially associated with Arthur Jelinek and his Pecos River basin survey in the early '60s. After the latter's return to Ann Arbor, Freeman worked jointly with myself and then newly arrived Lewis R. Binford. Freeman was among the first coterie of the so-called New Archaeologists produced over the '60s decade, largely under the inspiration of Binford, although variously mentored by other faculty as well, including R. McC. Adams, R.J. Braidwood, and myself. Despite this purported association, Freeman was and has remained a free spirit, an independent thinker, and a recalcitrant convert. He cannot be especially closely identified with many aspects of that particular intellectual manifestation. Freeman was selected by me to supervise excavations in successive summer field seasons (1962, 1963) at the Acheulian locality of Torralba on the Central Meseta of Spain, which I had just relocated and tested. He was encouraged by Jelinek, Franqois Bordes (at the University of Chicago during Autumn 1959), and myself to pursue Paleolithic researches and devoted the interseason interval, and subsequently, to a comparative study of the Iberian Mousterian, with particular reference to Cantabria. This led not only to the doctorate (1964) and complete facility in the Spanish language, but also to his acquaintance with and subsequent marriage to Susan Tax, then engaged in a study of the village of Torralba and environs for her own doctorate at Harvard. Freeman's work on the Iberian Mousterian afforded the first extra-Aquitanian examination of this industrial complex, following procedures and strictures developed by F. Bordes and his friend M. Bourgon. Two years later, R.G. Klein (Ph.D. 1966) afforded comparable insight into the Mousterian of European Russia. And, the following year witnessed the appearance of Gerhard Bosinski's massive Die Mittelpaltiolithischen Funde im Westlichen Mitteleuropa, the outcome of his doctorate at Universitait Koln in 1963. Any long-prevailing conceptions of this industrial complex were suddenly thoroughly and radically transformed.