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,…
The Cerutti Mastodon and the San Diego School: A brief history of the claim
While the Cerutti Mastodon claim may be new to most of us because of the recent Letter to Nature (Holen et al 2017), it has in fact been making the rounds for about 20 years. It is part of a much deeper current of advocacy for the interglacial presence of early humans in the San…
Comparing the 2005 and 2017 SAA symposia on modeling and simulation
There are some very interesting, revealing, and encouraging differences between the SAA symposium on modeling and simulation organized by Benjamin Davies at the 2017 Vancouver meeting (Modeling People, Places, and Things: revisiting archaeology as model-based science) and the one I organized at the 2005 Salt Lake City meeting (Theoretical and Methodological Requirements for Archaeological Simulation).…
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