Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale was “the” place to be for anyone interested in North or West Mexican studies. J. Charles Kelley, Carroll “Cal” Riley, Campbell Pennington, and Basil Hedrick constituted the cadre of scholars who specialized in the region but also served as mentors and models for what anthropological archaeology could be, even in the pre-Binfordian days. Walter Taylor also was there as an icon of theoretical archaeology. All of these scholars not only believed but also demonstrated that the subdisciplines of anthropology were intimately connected. To pursue one perspective to the exclusion of the other subdisciplines was deemed artificially limiting. Into this milieu came Lewis and Sally Binford during the summers of 1962 and 1963, working on the Carlyle Reservoir project in southern Illinois, which included excavations at Hatchery West, Toothsome, and Galley Pond. At about the same time, they began publishing archaeological theory and methodology that revolutionized the discipline. Only Lew and Sally can say how their time in Carbondale shaped their perspectives but, for me, I'd like to think that the Carbondale experience positively influenced their interdisciplinary work. I well remember discussions with Kelley regarding the new archaeology that he learned under Clyde Kluckhohn at Harvard before and during WWII, in comparison to the other “new” archaeology championed by the Binfords. Riley, Pennington, and Hedrick provided students with opportunities to integrate the archaeological perspective with the ethnographic and historical in material culture studies. The graduate students, including Weigand, Joe Mountjoy, and others, kept the discussion alive.