An Interview With Antonio Gilman Guillen. Part 2

This contribution completes the interview with Antonio Gilman Guillen, the first part of which was published in Trabajos de Prehistoria 77 (1). Gilman is an emeritus professor at California State University-Northridge, served as director of Trabajos de Prehistoria in 2015-2018, and has dedicated most of his work to the later prehistory of the Iberian peninsula. The subject of this second part falls into two parts. In the first Gilman reflects on how Spanish archaeology has developed during the decades of his work: his views on the nature of traditional archaeology during the Franco regime, the character of the discipline's modernization, its more recent development, and the most important changes in the archaeological record. These issues are addressed on the basis of his experience as a foreign researcher in Spain and his own scholarly contributions, including his critical compilation of Iberian radiocarbon chronology. The second part addresses the intellectual context of his archaeological practice. He discusses his training as part of the second generation of the New Archaeology, the contribution of Marxism to the development of a critical, historically oriented functionalism, and the importance of theoretical antecedents such as Childe, Adams, and Wolf. In this context we review his opinions on some of the subjects that define his work as a prehistorian: the problems of the origins of social inequality, the political organization of "intermediate societies", and the "Upper Palaeolithic revolution". We also refer to the challenges presented by "archaeological science" and especially palaeo-genetics and its influence on the revival of a culture-historical and diffusionist archaeology. Finally, there is an evaluation of the contrast between the European historicist tradition and the current state of North American anthropological archaeology.