Just yesterday, I was on one of my hobby horses, arguing that we live in a post-journal academic world but don’t quite realize it yet. Today, I find this twitter moment from John Hawks. Contributions like this one, no matter who they are from, must be considered full academic contributions, on a par with refereed…
As I have argued before, the post-journal academic world is here. We no longer have to build it. The post-journal era of academic publishing does not involve a radical change in the way we do our work, and it doesn’t involve a rejection of academic principles. On the contrary, it is an affirmation of those…
Following my evaluation of the recent Santa Elina potential find of glacial era artefacts in South America, @CDWren asked me about the claim of 18 000 year old material at Monte Verde. The short version is that I think the material from Monte Verde is convincing until about 14 000 years ago. Beyond that, it…
Vialou et al’s Peopling South America’s centre: the late Pleistocene site of Santa Elina, should really be titled Two modified osteoderms from a Pleistocene layer. The authors claim evidence of occupation of central South America going back almost 24 000 years, which would push back settlement by at the very least 10 000 years. There…
Since the publication of the discovery in Nature back in late April, the Cerutti Mastodon site has continued to be in the news. Predictably, it appears in popular science websites and continues to be a darling of fringe theorists. While the initial coverage in the media and popular web sites highlighted some of the very…
Archaeological research is driven by the questions we ask ourselves in the present, for reasons that are in the present. To answer those questions, we study archaeological remains that exist in the present. The answers we find function in the present. They affect people’s lives, sometimes significantly. Control of the past is a powerful weapon.…
Any senior administrative retreat in a university is likely to feature lamentations about siloing of the disciplines, faculties, and administrative services. People will call for de-siloing. The timid will call for multidisciplinarity, the bold for true interdisciplinarity. Everyone will agree that reward structures for faculty, staff and students must be changed to encourage collaborative and…
In winter 2015, I taught ANTH 381 at McGill University. As a class project, we studied the evolution of flashlight holding in film and television. We started from the observation that in contemporary film and television, flashlights tend to be held in an overhand style, but that in older productions, they tend to be held…
A tweet by @saragoldrickrab recently started an extensive discussion on the topic of the accessibility of scholarship. She encourages us to “write a book accessible to more than 100 people”. I was surprised at how controversial her statement turned out to be. In a series of responses, for example, @GrahamScambler defends the value of an “esoteric”…
In her annual Day of Archaeology post, Betty Wragg Sykes gives us an update on the “braided delta” development of her career. She concludes that “everything in archaeological careers is about luck”. I agree with her that luck is the dominant factor in establishing a career in archaeology, but there are at least two other…
