Michael Brian Schiffer is one of the founders and pre-eminent exponents of behavioral archaeology. 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. His most important early contribution to archaeology was the rejection of the common processualist assumption that the archaeological record is a transparent fossil record of actual ancient societies. In fact, he argues, artifacts and sites undergo, respectively post-use and post-occupational modification by diverse formation processes.
In his 1972 American Antiquity article Schiffer, using flow models, explained that artifacts generally pass through numerous social contexts of procurement, manufacture, use, recycling and disposal and that the same kind of artifact can enter the archaeological record at many points through this life history. As societies become more sedentary, the archaeological record typically seems to be one of garbage disposal.
Schiffer's body of theory and method is based on the idea that cultural and noncultural processes convert the 'systemic context' into the 'archaeological context'. Although this approach has been criticized, notably by Lewis Binford, it has permanently affected how archaeologists interpret the archaeological record.