As an archaeologist, I am interested in culture change, and that includes changes in conventions, expectations and practices. Sometimes, these can happen over amazingly short time-spans (archaeologically speaking). One change that I’ve noticed over the past few decades, which is a short time for an archaeologist, is that especially at playoff games, almost the entirety…
Did a comet airburst destroy the Hopewell? Comment on The Hopewell Airburst Event, 1699-1567 Years Ago (252-383 CE), by Tankersley et al. (2022).
Tankersley et al. (2022) recently published a brief paper in Nature Scientific Reports, arguing that the Hopewell culture of the first half of the first millennium CE in the North American Midwest was ended, or at least severely helped along toward its demise, by a comet fragment airburst event. The paper is getting quite a…
Finally getting to the practical part of the practical guide to addressing pseudoarchaeology
4 Addressing pseudoarchaeology There was a time when well-behaved, responsible, professional archaeologists did not engage with pseudo-archaeology and its claims. For the few who did, “it is quite common for us to receive a negative response from our colleagues; We are often asked why we waste our energy thinking, researching, and writing about nonsensical claims”…
A further chunk of the (eventual) practical guide to addressing pseudoarchaeology
Note: This project is now a few months late, but given the circumstances, things are going well. Regular readers of this blog will have seen most of this material in one form or another, but it is now re-ordered, reworked and revised to some extent. This part is the opening. 1 Teaching against pseudoarchaeology Many…
My encounter with pseudo-archaeology
There was a used bookstore downtown, in a barely renovated nineteenth century warehouse. It was five floors of dense, rickety shelves, piled high with jumbled paperbacks in various states of decay. To say that they were sorted in any kind of order would have been a gross exaggeration, but there was a certain thematic geography…
ArcheoThoughts 