FRANÇOIS BORDES Paul Pettitt - Lithics – The Journal of the Lithic

P. Pettitt: François Bordes
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FRANÇOIS BORDES
Paul Pettitt
Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ET, UK.
Contact email: [e-mail]
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ABSTRACT
François Bordes was one of the most influential Palaeolithic archaeologists in the western
European and North American paradigms. In a career that spanned some four decades he
devised the classificatory scheme that is still widely employed today, through meticulous
excavation of Quaternary sites in France from the Périgord to the Paris Basin, pioneering
experimental knapping, ensuring that the heuristic of l‟evolution buissonante came to define
how Palaeolithic archaeologists conceived of change, and, particularly, the introduction of
quantification to existing type fossil approaches to the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. Here,
I survey briefly some main points of his work, and his contribution to and opinion of other
contributions to the „Mousterian debate‟. Far from being restricted to developing our
understanding of the Mousterian, Bordes‟ output was just as important in the Lower and
Upper Palaeolithic. His technotypological scheme, introduced in the 1950s, precipitated a
major change in the way prehistorians thought about the Palaeolithic record, and essentially
ushered in the modern intellectual world.
Full reference: Pettitt, P. 2009. François Bordes. In R. Hosfield, F. Wenban-Smith & M.
Pope (eds.) Great Prehistorians: 150 Years of Palaeolithic Research, 1859–2009 (Special
Volume 30 of Lithics: The Journal of the Lithic Studies Society): 201–212. Lithic Studies
Society, London.
Keywords: Lithics, Mousterian, Middle Palaeolithic, Typology, France
INTRODUCTION
For the middle decades of the twentieth
century, the Palaeolithic of the Périgord and
François Bordes (1919–1981: Figure 1) were
effectively synonymous. Along with his
wife, Denise de Sonneville-Bordes (1919–
2008) Bordes set the technological and
typological scene for the western European
research paradigm from the early 1950s, and
has left a legacy that still influences
researchers in Western and Central Europe
and North America to this day. He can
indeed be regarded as ―one of the founders
of modern Palaeolithic research‖ (Rolland &
Dibble 1990: 481). Like his predecessors
such as the Abbé Breuil (Davies, this
volume) Bordes had an intimate
acquaintance with lithics from southwest
French sites — many of which he excavated
— yet was not afraid to extend the insights
he‘d gained from study of these sites to a
continental or even global stage. The purpose
of this paper is not to provide a
comprehensive review of Bordes‘ work, but
rather to ‗sample‘ areas in which his
influence was (and remains) profound, and
place these in something of a wider context.
Readers may find it somewhat biased in
favour of the Anglophone literature: it is
deliberately so, to show the profound effect
Bordes‘ work had on Anglo-American
archaeology, and this should not be taken to
lessen the considerable influence Bordes had
in France and many other European
countries. When discussing Bordes it is

Great Prehistorians: 150 Years of Palaeolithic Research, 1859–2009 (Lithics 30)
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inevitable that the subject of ‗Mousterian
variability‘ will come somewhat to the fore; I
have felt it necessary to provide a brief
‗history‘ of the debate that ensued after
Bordes recognised Middle Palaeolithic
assemblage patterning, but this is cursory
and uneven for a reason; this is a paper about
Bordes, not the Mousterian, and my
coverage is intended to elucidate Bordes‘
contribution and opinions about the
contribution of others to the debate. First,
however, I shall explore his wider interests
and achievements.
Figure 1: François Bordes (right) with F. Clark Howell. From the collection of Denise de Sonneville-
Bordes. Unknown photographer. [Photograph courtesy of Michel Lenoir]
BORDES’ BROADER CAREER AND
THE BORDESIAN ERA
Perhaps the best way to crystallise Bordes‘
contribution to Palaeolithic archaeology is to
pose the question of what the field would be
like had he not made any contribution to it.
This question was, in fact, posed to me
during my PhD viva in 1998 by my
examiners, Clive Gamble and John Gowlett.
Bordes‘ work was the cornerstone of my
doctoral research; I was investigating aspects
of Mousterian lithic assemblage variability,
in southwest France, using collections from
Bordes‘ own excavations at Combe Grenal
and Pech de l‘Azé. Bordes bestrode the
pages of the thesis like the colossus. My
supervisor Paul Mellars and I would often
discuss aspects of Bordes‘ work, and
particularly the debates between himself,

P. Pettitt: François Bordes
203
Bordes and Binford over what the
technological and typological variability
recognised within the Mousterian meant. I
had read most of Bordes‘ series of
publications of the 1950s and 1960s in which
he developed the méthode Bordes and in
which he developed the typological,
technological characterisation and statistical
analysis of lithic assemblages, and my copy
of the Typologie du Paléolithique Ancien et
Moyen, which I had bought in Les Eyzies in
1993, never made it from my desk to the
shelf until I had finished writing. Yet the
question totally threw me. I had taken
Bordes‘ work totally for granted, and it took
some mental gymnastics to even try to
conceive what the academic field of Lower
and Middle Palaeolithic archaeology might
have been like if Bordes had not made such a
pronounced contribution to the field. It could
easily have happened, given his history and
early interests. What if, for example, he had
stuck with botany; specialised in geology;
written science fiction as Francis Carsac full-
time; or worse, died as a resistance fighter in
the second world war? Our understanding of
the lithic record would be considerably
poorer for want of his pioneering
experimental knapping (Bordes & Crabtree
1969, and see Dibble & Debénath 1991:
222). There would be no vocabulary that
focussed prehistorians on why Middle
Palaeolithic assemblages varied, and
therefore no structured debate as to the
behavioural capacities of the Neanderthals.
Lewis Binford would not have had
Mousterian variability to kick-start his
promotion of the ‗new archaeology‘, nor
would Paul Mellars have a chrono-cultural
sequence to demonstrate assemblage change
over time. In turn, this would not have
stimulated Harold Dibble to introduce
perspectives from New World archaeology
as explanations for the dynamics of lithic
variability, and overall we would not have
arrived at our understanding today of the
variable trajectories of Middle Palaeolithic
technologies that resulted from Neanderthal
behavioural flexibility (Hovers & Kuhn
2006). Of course one can argue that others
would have found the route at some point,
but one wonders how far behind the
discipline would have been if, for example,
Palaeolithic lithic analysis had missed the
‗new archaeology boat‘ of the mid-1960s.
Bordes was, for much of his career,
Professor of Prehistory and Quaternary
Geology at the University of Bordeaux,
where he had studied botany and geology in
the 1930s. At Bordeaux he inherited an
intellectual tradition that could be traced
back through Peyrony to Breuil, in which the
sequences of Palaeolithic assemblages
derived from the rockshelters of the
Dordogne were seen to have wider (at least
western European) significance, unfolded in
a temporal succession over Pleistocene time,
and could be described and distinguished on
the basis of technotypological traits which
formed the basis of an artefact taxonomic
system (Sackett 1991, and see also Davies,
this volume). Bordes, however, brought
geological expertise to Palaeolithic
archaeology; his contact with Raymond
Vaufrey and Jean Piveteau in Paris during
the second world war led to research on the
loess sequences and Lower and Middle
Palaeolithic archaeology of the Somme and
Seine Basins just after fighting ended,
resulting in the presentation of a thesis to the
Facultés des Sciences in Paris. From this
time onwards Bordes was working on a
standardised typology of the Lower and
Middle Palaeolithic that culminated in the
Typologie (Bordes 1961b). The use of
fossiles directeurs had been promoted by the
brothers Bouyssonie, but it was only with the
méthode Bordes that assemblages could be
compared objectively in terms of the
frequency of these type fossils (Binford &
Binford 1966: 238; Kozlowski 1992). The
emergent patterning revealed, in Bordes‘
term, l‟évolution buissonante — branching
(or bushy) evolution — through which
archaeologists could recognise that lithic
assemblages, and thus behaviour, evolved in
complex ways as did biological species
(Bordes 1950a). Straus & Clark (e.g. 1986)
coined the term phylogenetic paradigm to

Great Prehistorians: 150 Years of Palaeolithic Research, 1859–2009 (Lithics 30)
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describe French lithic systematics, which to
some seemed self-contained and inward
looking, although which, with the benefit of
hindsight, had a profound effect upon later
twentieth century Palaeolithic archaeology.
Sackett (1991: 132), for example, has
defined the ‗Bordesian era‘ as the period
with which ―we enter modern times‖.
Bordes‘ method ―is [still] considered the
standard typology for the Lower and Middle
Palaeolithic in most of the western Old
World‖ (Dibble & Debénath 1991: 222). To
Sackett, the Bordesian era ―saw a significant
leap in the degree of resolution with which
prehistorians were able to exercise control
over the empirical contents of the [Middle
and] Upper Palaeolithic record‖ (ibid: 133).
Implications of this new ability to quantify,
characterise, compare and interpret lithic
assemblages were profound, and affected
even recovery methods and sampling
strategies; ―excavation took on the character
of stratigraphic dissection…all lithic
materials were now saved…techniques were
devised to use…palaeoenvironmental data in
conjunction with the artefact industries to
seriate site stratigraphies holistically, thus
recasting regional taxonomic schemes into
the form of ‗chronostratigraphies‘ which
eventually came to be supplemented by a
time line of radiocarbon dates (ibid: 133). In
this sense, in addition to provoking for the
first time rigour in recovery strategies,
Bordes‘ scheme can be seen as transitional,
in the sense that it both represented the most
sophisticated expression of relative schemes
in archaeology and the absolute
chronostratigraphy that was just around the
corner.
Bordes introduced statistics to the study of
lithic assemblages in 1950, enabling both
qualitative and quantitative approaches to
lithics to be employed simultaneously.
Assemblages would be characterised on the
basis of a combination of his typological trait
list and technological attributes, following
which they could be subjected to statistical
characterisation. Although Bordes was a
highly prolific researcher and writer, his
formative period — that in which he was
developing his method and interests and
essentially laying down the contribution for
which he is mainly remembered —
essentially spans two decades from 1950 to
1970. Subsequent to his studies of the
northern French loess sites in the late 1940s
his work progressed from initial outlines of
his method (e.g. Bordes 1950b) to the
recognition of l‟évolution buissonante;
discrimination of the Mousterian, Tayacien
and Levalloisian (e.g. Bordes & Bourgon
1951b); refinement of technological criteria,
notably Levalloisian (e.g. Bordes 1952a,
1953a); statistical analysis (e.g. Bordes
1953b); further refinement of typological
definitions (e.g. Bordes 1953c, 1954a);
stratigraphy and chronology, particularly
with the new radiocarbon technique (e.g.
Bordes 1956a, 1957a, 1958a, 1960);
interpretation of Middle Palaeolithic lithic
assemblage variability (Bordes 1961a, 1970);
and Upper Palaeolithic typology and wider
behavioural aspects including art (e.g.
Bordes 1958b, 1963, 1964a, 1964b, 1965a).
The excavation and study of cave and
rockshelter assemblages spans the entirety of
Bordes‘ formative period, involving a
minimum of 38 publications on 29 sites
(Table 1).
Although Bordes tends to be associated most
strongly with the Mousterian, it is clear from
the table that his attention was focussed as
much on the Lower and Upper Palaeolithic,
with the Lower Palaeolithic represented by
some 24% (n=7) of his published sites and
the Upper Palaeolithic by 31% (n=9), i.e. a
little over 50%. The association of Bordes
primarily with the Middle Palaeolithic has
come about by the number of publications
relating to the period (44% of the total using
the publication list in Bordes 1992), which is
not surprising, given that they were critical
to the development of the méthode Bordes.

P. Pettitt: François Bordes
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Sites by period
Publication reference
Lower Palaeolithic
Carrièrre Bouchon (Seine)
1946
Pech de l‘Azé Nord
1951b
L‘Atelier Commont
1953d
Vassincourt
1955a
Combe-Grenal
1955b
Amiens
1955c
Pech de l‘Azé II
1969
Middle Palaeolithic
Le Moustier
1948a, 1959
Saint-Cyprien
Bordes & Bourgon 1948
Pech de l‘Azé Nord
Bordes & Bourgon 1950, 1951a
La Chaise
1952b, 1953e, 1965b
L‘Abri Armand Chadourne
1954b
Pech de l‘Azé
1954c
L‘Ermitage
1954d
Combe-Grenal
1955b, Bordes et al. 1966
Mas Viel
1956b
Haute-Roche
1957b
La Micoque
1958c
Roc de Marsal
1962
Upper Palaeolithic
Abilly (Solutrean)
1950c
Villejuif (Aurignacian)
1948b, 1949
Evreux (Epipalaeolithic)
1951b
Laugerie-Haute
1954e, 1958b, Bordes & de Sonneville-Bordes 1958
Gare-de-Couze (Magdalenian)
1963, 1964a
Roc de Gavaudun (Gravettian)
1964b
Laugerie-Haute (Solutrean)
1965a
Corbiac (Gravettian)
1968a, Bordes & Crabtree 1969
Table 1: Selected publications by Bordes on the stratigraphy and assemblages of major Palaeolithic
sites in France & neighbouring countries 1950–1970. This is not meant to be exhaustive.
BORDES, THE MOUSTERIAN, AND
THE ‘MOUSTERIAN DEBATE’
Bordes, either working alone or initially in
collaboration with Maurice Bourgon,
developed his classificatory scheme of
Mousterian variants between 1947 and 1965,
although the méthode Bordes was effectively
in place by 1953 (e.g. Bordes 1953c). From
that point Bordes expanded his system
geographically. The scheme was developed
using sites and materials deriving from the
Périgord to the Seine Basin. In 1981, after
twenty-five years of development and
discovery, Bordes (1981) felt that his scheme
for western Europe was still justified and that
additional aspects of Mousterian variability
could be recognised from northern Europe to
the Near East.
Bordes recognised that Mousterian
assemblages of southwestern France could
be divided into four main types:
Mousterian of Acheulian Tradition
(characterised by the presence of
handaxes and thus seen to be descended
from the preceding Acheulian, as well as
numerous scrapers, denticulates and, in
particular, backed knives). This he
subdivided into Type A (chronologically
earlier and with higher frequencies of
handaxes) and Type B (chronologically
later, with fewer handaxes and a general
rise in the importance of backed knives)
Typical Mousterian (with no singularly
predominant form, differing from the
previous by sharply reduced frequencies