In the interviews, Binford is reported as saying that her parents were racists, and one of her first realizations of this was when she had a crush on a Chinese boy at school in the second grade.
In 1962 she completed her PhD at the University of Chicago in the department of anthropology, publishing on a survey of early prehistory in the Sahara.
The faculty was all male and Binford felt that she was not taken seriously and experienced gender discrimination as a female student and single mother.
[6] Sally and Lewis co-edited New Perspectives in Archaeology (1968), deriving from a symposium held in 1965 in Denver at the annual American Anthropological Association Conference.
[10] Her challenge of François Bordes in the 1960s over his taxonomic description of ancient French stone tool assemblages from the Mousterian period lead to the Bordes-Binford Debate, which revealed the discrepancies in training and theory that are practiced by European and American archaeologists.
[13] The artist Gabriella Ripley-Phipps curated the participatory event and mixed media video installation The Archival Dinner Party in 2009.