I structure my courses around what I don’t know. Since we know so little about the past, archaeology is well suited to that approach, but I imagine other disciplines are, too. I start a course by asking one of the great unanswered questions of the discipline: is cultural innovation like random mutation? Is there archaeological…
The Solutrean hypothesis part 2: Archaeology is political, archaeologists are not politicians
Predictably, the third section of my recent post on the Nature of Things’ Ice Bridge documentary, which dealt with the political and ethical aspects of the controversy, generated the most discussion, whether on social media, by email, or in person. Here are few more thoughts and clarifications that emerge from those exchanges. Yes, archaeology is…
The Nature of Things builds an Ice Bridge to nowhere
Like many Canadians my age, I grew up watching the Nature of Things on CBC. It was part of my education. Last week, I started seeing online chatter about the upcoming episode “Ice Bridge”, about the so-called Solutrean hypothesis, that the first occupants of the Americas followed the ice edge from Western Europe to the…
The slow retreat of human exceptionalism and the timid return of mixing in human evolution
The timid return of mixing in human evolution Note: This was prompted by John Hawks’ recent post on introgression In the pre-war anthropological imagination, human diversity was the result of the gradual mixing of primeval regional stocks. Where these stocks had come from, whether they had sprung out of the earth fully formed, no one…
Archeothoughts 2017 annual: Main themes, and lessons learned by a first time academic blogger
I didn’t expect to ever become an academic blogger, but several developments in 2017 changed my mind. I have been increasingly dissatisfied with the state of academic publishing, and I have been casting about for alternatives. A few years ago, I became involved in an open access project and rapidly determined that the solution did…
ArcheoThoughts 