Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol 6, No. 4, 1998 Status and Role of Formation Theory in Contemporary Archaeological Practice Michael J. Shott1 Since Binford appropriated the term "middle-range theory," it has signified the process of reasoning from the extant material record to the cultural past, Merton's sociological concept of middle-range theory is relevant to archaeology, but does not mean what Binford denoted by it. More accurately, Binford's domain should be called formation theory." By whatever name used, archaeologists differ greatly in our views of its role and status. Somehow, formation theory has come to be viewed as method but not theory, and as intrinsic to materialism, but irrelevant if not antithetical to other ontologies. Yet it is as critical to the contextual understanding of the past sought by many archaeologists today—a role that, among others, belies formation theory's marginal status in academic practice. INTRODUCTION The material record is archaeology's mixed blessing, at once registering cultural meaning and process on a vast time scale and posing daunting interpretive problems. Archaeologists struggle constantly with the familiar problematics of inference because what we observe in the record does not register directly what we wish to know about the past. Instead, the two are mediated by assemblage formation. We have long acknowledged this me- diation, if we have only indifferently regarded it. In response to this condition but from different perspectives, Binford (1977, 1981a, 1982) and Raab and Goodyear (1984; Goodyear et al., 1978) 1Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminology, University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa 50614-0513. e-mail: shott@uni.edu. KEY WORDS: middle-range theory; assemblage; formation; material record. 299 1059-0161/98/1200-0299$15.00 C 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation