The academic journal is obsolete and we don’t need to build its replacement. We have it already. We just need to recognize its value and to start recognizing its output. We simply don’t need journals and presses anymore. We have better right now. The traditional journal system restricts both the diversity of inputs and the…
Access to academic journals cannot, by definition, be illicit
The Journal Nature just reported on a US court judgement that grants publisher Elsevier monetary damages from “websites that provide illicit access” to academic papers. To quote Bernie Sanders, “let me be very clear”: access to academic papers and academic journals cannot, by definition and under any circumstance, be illicit. I am sure it can…
Canada 150 or Canada 15 000?
This week, I gave a talk at the Bodo Archaeological Society on the earliest human occupations in the Americas. As I was driving across Alberta, working on my talk, seeing all those stunning landscapes, thinking about how they had evolved since the Last Glacial Maximum, and imagining how people had lived in them and adapted…
What kind of culture do you want?
In a senior administration meeting, a colleague recently asked: “What kind of culture do we want in the institution?” That got me thinking about the fairly substantial intersection between my academic work and my administrative duties. The short answer to my colleague’s question is that we don’t get the culture we want. We get the…
Predatory journals are not the problem. We are.
Between May 7th and June 7th, I received 24 invitations to submit papers to 21 journals that represent 14 publishers. One was from a well-established and highly regarded organization in archaeology. The others were from what are now sometimes called predatory journals. I decided to read the invitations and look into the journals behind them…
The Holocene catastrophe: Archaeological thoughts on climate change
As I read about the US government pulling out of the Paris climate accord, I wonder what we can contribute to the conversation as archaeologists. Certainly, we can talk about human adaptation to climate and environmental change in the long term. It occurs to me that there are lessons from the past that might be…
Two rejections of Human exceptionalism
There is a very powerful human exceptionalist current in western thought, especially in, but not limited to the humanities and social sciences. Human exceptionalism is the belief that humans are fundamentally and qualitatively different from the rest of nature. One of its corollaries is that the theories and tools we use to study nature can’t…
Graecopithecus: The strangely persistent case for an earliest hominin in Europe
In these days of Out of Africa genomic hegemony, it is easy to forget that until recently, and despite Darwin and Huxley’s early intuition, the African origins of our lineage were controversial, and for a long time, even considered a fringe theory. It isn’t so long ago that multiregional evolution of modern humans was on…
Who and what is open archaeological data for?
Discussing the disincentives to and constraints on sharing data in archaeology, Lorna Richardson asks “Do you think there's an issue w not knowing who to aim open data at? Planning for niche, specialist use or other?”. In short, yes, I believe there is. Perhaps when faced with the prospect of preparing and organizing our data, we…
The traditional prestige economy of archaeology is preventing its emergence as an open science
Archaeology initially evolved as a group of fairly autonomous regional traditions, mostly national, that study the evolution of regional traditions. The idea of big A archaeology, as opposed to “archaeologies of x”, is still not as well established as many of us like to assume. Many of us like the idea at an intellectual level,…
