The moralizing gods saga has ended, or at least its first chapter. Two years ago, Nature published (Whitehouse et al 2019) a widely publicized paper that claimed to demonstrate that moralizing gods, who care more about relationships between humans than relationships between humans and gods, developed following major social complexification events, and not prior to…
Four years of academic blogging: What I have learned so far
I put up my first blog post on April 28th 2017. In the previous 24 hours, I had seen the explosion of media coverage and public engagement about the first Cerutti Mastodon paper in Nature. I went to the original paper, and I knew that as an academic and as a teacher, I had to…
Thoughts on the post-pandemic university: A learning commons
We must reimagine university teaching and learning for a pandemic and post-pandemic world. Instead of seeing our campuses as assemblages of rooms in which sections are taught and exams are held, we should view them as learning commons in which learning and assessment are facilitated. We don’t need to create a course schedule for the…
Comment on Somerville et al. (2021) on the possibility of 30k year old archaeological material in the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico
Somerville et al. (2021) recently raise the possibility in Latin American Antiquity of 30k year old archaeological material at Coxcatlan cave in the Tehuacan Valley of Mexico. This one isn’t making much of a splash in the media (so far), and I suspect that is because it is actually cautious and very appropriately presented. At…
Oak Island Archaeology Update: Does the water analysis show that there is silver buried on Oak Island?
On Season 8 Episode 24 of Curse of Oak Island (COOI), environmental scientist Ian Spooner and Chemist Matt Lukeman, both professors at Acadia University, unveil the results of a study of groundwater contamination on Oak Island, arguing that high levels of copper and zinc may indicate “a Gerhardt dumptruck’s” worth of silver is buried on…
