Leslie Gordon Freeman

Leslie Gordon Freeman, Jr

Leslie Gordon Freeman, Jr, 77, died on December 14, 2012, in Portland, Oregon. Born in Warsaw, NY, in 1935, Freeman received a BA in anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1954. He then worked for a utility company, and later served with the US Army in Germany, before beginning graduate study at Chicago in 1959.

Freeman began in sociocultural anthropology, but under the influence of F Clark Howell, shifted to archaeology. Howell introduced him to paleolithic fieldwork at the Acheulean sites of Torralba and Ambrona, Spain, in 1962–63. Nearly all of his subsequent research was done in Spain. After completing his dissertation on Mousterian lithic variability in the northern Spanish region of Cantabria in 1964, he taught for a year at Tulane University, before returning to Chicago as a faculty member. He remained there until his retirement in 2000.

Leslie Freeman was an active participant in several important developments involving American archaeology during the 1960s and subsequent decades. One was the “New Archaeology,” whose charismatic proponent Lewis Binford taught at Chicago while Freeman was a graduate student. Second was application of Clark Howell’s and Desmond Clark’s concept of paleoanthropology as a collaborative enterprise integrating the methods of archaeology and biological anthropology, as well as other anthropological subfields. Third was the engagement of a significant number of US workers in paleolithic research.

Freeman carried out two major excavation projects in Cantabria with his collaborator and close friend, Joaquín González Echegaray, at Cueva Morín and El Juyo. He also excavated at Abric Agut in Catalunya in the 1970s, and returned with Howell to work at Ambrona in the 1980s.

Freeman’s published research centered on several themes, including reports on his excavations; Mousterian lithic variability and its appropriate statistical analysis; the human behavior and nonhuman factors that produced the archaeological record of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic; the study of faunal remains for information on susbsistence and diet; and the art and symbolism of the Upper Paleolithic. To all of these concerns, he brought broad and deep knowledge of the paleolithic record, and a strong concern with hypothesis-testing and selection of appropriate analytical methods for the data at hand. Freeman was an active member of the Spanish paleolithic research community; approximately a third of his publications, including the monographs on Morín and El Juyo, were in Spanish.

With his longtime colleagues Karl Butzer and Richard Klein in the paleolithic contingent at Chicago, Freeman trained a number of Paleolithic archaeologists, including Geoffrey Clark, Margaret Conkey, Lawrence Straus, Thomas Volman, James Pokines, Heather Stettler, Catherine Flataker Mueller-Wille and myself. All were influenced by his passion for understanding the paleolithic record, and his enthusiasm for new ideas, techniques, and gadgets that might enhance that understanding. His exuberant personality and irrepressible sense of humor left an indelible impression on everyone who knew him.

Leslie Freeman is survived by his wife, the sociocultural anthropologist Susan Tax Freeman , their daughter Sarah E Freeman, his stepmother Jane Freeman, and sister Antoinette Freeman. (Francis B Harrold)

via Anthropology-News http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2013/03/18/leslie-gordon-freeman/