Last week, the White House issued a guidance memo on Open Access, to not quite as much fanfare as could have been expected, and causing (so far) surprisingly muted controversy. The memo requires US federal agencies that fund research to ensure that any publicly funded peer-reviewed scholarly publications “are made freely available and publicly accessible…
Moralizing Gods Redux
In 2019, Whitehouse et al. ignited a relative firestorm of controversy around the Big Gods Hypothesis of social complexification. The Big Gods Hypothesis holds that belief in moralizing big gods allowed, or perhaps even drove the significant increases in the scale and complexity of human societies that we see in many places throughout the past…
Evaluating the claim of 37ky old archaeological material at the Hartley Mammoth locality in New Mexico
Rowe et al. (2022) recently argue that the pattern of breakage and degradation of bone at the Hartley Mammoth locality in northern New Mexico is evidence of human activity 37ky ago. If true, this would make the Hartley locality the oldest solidly dated archaeological site in the Americas by a factor more than two. The…
Hopewell airburst event news : Tankersley et al. retreat from comet to asteroid hypothesis
Coming at it from an astrophysical rather than an archaeological perspective, Neuhäuser and Neuhäuser (2022) published a brief but effective critique of Tankersley et al.’s (2022a) paper on the possible destruction of the archaeological Hopewell Culture by a comet airburst about 1600 years ago. Tankersley et al.’s (2022b) have a response, both in Nature Scientific…
RGBCatastrophe: A Netlogo tool for teaching, learning, and thinking about complexity
As an archaeologist, I am interested in long-term change and how it works. Given the current multiple situations around us at the moment, it isn't surprising that I have been increasingly thinking about sudden change in particular, and why it sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. One of the answers is that we live…
ArcheoThoughts 