Manya Whitaker’s recent Chronicle column on publishing strategies generated some Twitter discussion (Here is an example, and here is another). Whitaker is critiqued for suggesting that early career researchers should focus on peer-reviewed journals from credible publishers, at the expense of more publicly engaged kinds of publishing. They should make sure that their material “appears…
The past is treasure
In an understandable fit of frustration, @anarchaeologist recently tweeted “HOW DO WE CONVINCE PEOPLE THE PAST IS NOT TREASURE!??!?!”. There followed an interesting discussion that ranged from the philosophical, in @HKNorton’s “And how do we convince people the past has value despite not being treasure?” to @KristeninAlmo’s practical and pedagogical “Stress the information over the…
The moralizing gods debacle takes a turn for the worse
Savage et al. (2019) have posted their response to Beheim et al.’s (2019) critique of their Nature paper (Whitehouse et al. 2019a) which argues that moralizing gods appear as a consequence of social complexification, rather than as its precursor, which the Big Gods hypothesis requires. I discussed the original controversy here and here. The Seshat…
Attitudes to change are key to the appeal of pseudoarchaeology
Attitudes to change are important to the mass appeal of ancient alien theory. Aliens, ancient and modern, often appear in the context of social, cultural, and technological innovation. The contactees of the 1950s received dire warnings from our friendly Space Brothers about the mortal danger to our species of newly acquired atomic power. By the…
Evaluating the claim of 16k year old remains at Cooper’s Ferry: A comment on Davis et al 2019
Sixteen thousand years seems to be the new target for earliest archaeological remains in the Americas. The team at Gault recently made the claim, along with the team at the associated Friedkin site. Now a team working at Cooper’s Ferry in Idaho have joined in. Let me start with my standard disclaimer: I have no…
ArcheoThoughts 