Between May 7th and June 7th, I received 24 invitations to submit papers to 21 journals that represent 14 publishers. One was from a well-established and highly regarded organization in archaeology. The others were from what are now sometimes called predatory journals. I decided to read the invitations and look into the journals behind them…
The Holocene catastrophe: Archaeological thoughts on climate change
As I read about the US government pulling out of the Paris climate accord, I wonder what we can contribute to the conversation as archaeologists. Certainly, we can talk about human adaptation to climate and environmental change in the long term. It occurs to me that there are lessons from the past that might be…
Two rejections of Human exceptionalism
There is a very powerful human exceptionalist current in western thought, especially in, but not limited to the humanities and social sciences. Human exceptionalism is the belief that humans are fundamentally and qualitatively different from the rest of nature. One of its corollaries is that the theories and tools we use to study nature can’t…
Graecopithecus: The strangely persistent case for an earliest hominin in Europe
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).…
Traditional academic publishing has jumped the Mastodon
The Cerutti Mastodon paper might be a significant turning point. It is for me, at least. Nature is the nec plus ultra of academic publishing. The acceptance rate hovers around 8% and only papers and letters “of outstanding scientific importance” are published. Which makes me wonder how the Mastodon paper got into Nature. Had it…
The Cerutti Mastodon: Eolith redux
I wish there was convincing evidence of human occupation of North America 130 000 years ago in the recent Nature paper on the Cerutti Mastodon find (Holen et al 2017). The bottom line is that there isn’t. The dating of the Mastodon itself is uncontroversial because it is plausible, although it is somewhat less than…
