MS 8 William A. Longacre Papers, 1937-2016 (bulk 1958-2004)

Materials from MS 8 William A. Longacre grouped by cultural affiliation. To access the full collection guide on Arizona Archives Online, click here.

To access archival materials, contact larc@arizona.edu.

Biographical Note

Dr. William Atlas Longacre II (1937-2015) was a leading archaeologist associated with the Processual Archaeology movement and former Head of Anthropology (1989-1998) at the University of Arizona. Raised in Houghton, Michigan, Longacre began his university education at Michigan Tech before transferring to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, where he earned a B.A. in anthropology in 1959. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1963, where he was influenced by Lewis R. Binford, proponent of Processual Archaeology (also called New Archaeology), which expanded the kinds of questions that archaeology examined and the relationships of archaeology to the larger discipline of anthropology. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Longacre began research at the Carter Ranch Site in east-central Arizona that would eventually be published as in 1970 as Archaeology as Anthropology: A Case Study, his most famous work. This groundbreaking piece of research used the techniques of Processual Archaeology to reconstruct prehistoric social organization at a 12th to mid-13th century AD Ancestral Pueblo community.

In 1964, Longacre was hired as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, rising to the rank of professor in 1974. Longacre directed the University of Arizona Archaeological Field School at Grasshopper Pueblo, Arizona from 1964-1978. In 1973, Longacre initiated a long term ethnoarchaeological research program focused on ceramics among the Kalinga, an indigenous group living in a remote area of northern Luzon in the Philippines. Longacre and his students continued this research from 1975 through the late 1980s. Their findings demonstrated a variety of systemic linkages among pottery manufacture (including design and morphological variation), measures of standardization, use-life, function, discard, specialized production, dynamic ceramic distributional networks, and community and regional organization, as well as exchange, wealth, and irrigated rice cultivation. Another generation of Longacre’s students, several trained as behavioral archaeologists, continued this work through the mid-1990s, offering longitudinal perspectives on material culture variability. The Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project, as it came to be known, was one of the largest and most varied research programs in the ethnoarchaeological field.

In 1989, Longacre was appointed Head of Anthropology at the University of Arizona, a position he held until 1998, when he became the Fred A. Riecker Distinguished Professor. Longacre published nine volumes and authored more than 60 papers throughout his career. He also held a number of visiting academic appointments, including at Yale University and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. For more than 30 years, Longacre was affiliated with the University of the Philippines, where he mentored and taught archaeology to both undergraduate and graduate students. He supervised 22 doctorates at the University of Arizona and mentored many more students both at Arizona and in the Philippines. In 2004, Longacre retired from the University of Arizona, capping a 40-year career at that institution. He died in Tucson on November 18, 2015.