Michael Brian Schiffer (born October 4, 1947, in Winnipeg, Canada) is an American archaeologist and one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology.
[1] Schiffer's earliest ideas, set out in his 1976 book Behavioral Archeology and many journal articles, are mainly concerned with the formation processes of the archaeological record (cultural and noncultural).
In that work, the editors and authors strove to demonstrate that cutting-edge research is a requirement for crafting rigorous arguments about the significance of archaeological resources.
Together, Schiffer and Skibo published around a dozen articles based on their collaboration in the laboratory, which included a different way to think about experimental archaeology and a framework for studying technological change.
These works uniquely combine an archaeological perspective with the use of historical materials and have led to four books and numerous articles, many of the latter aimed at archaeologists with behavioral models for studying technological change.