Michael Brian Schiffer

Michael Schiffer is one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. Schiffer's ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archaeology and a number of journal articles, are mainly concerned with site formation processes. His most important contribution to archaeology is his rejection of the common processualist assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of actual ancient societies. Schiffer explains that artefacts are destroyed and transformed by numerous cultural and natural processes