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.…
Silos are a feature of university organization, not a bug
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…
When did the overhand flashlight hold become dominant in film and television?
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…
The secret language of the humanities
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”…
My lucky streak in academia
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…
Author supported Open Access is not an adequate solution
Marc Couture explains that academic publishing is at a crossroads. That in itself is an obvious and unremarkable statement. But he introduces the idea that this crossroads involves a choice about whether academic publishing is a public good. This makes me realize that the current discussion of the future of academic publishing is just a…
The academic journal is obsolete
The academic journal is obsolete and we don’t need to build its replacement.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…
