A pair of articles from last week, one in Science and on in Time, renew warnings about the dangers of unchecked pseudoarchaeology. The big week in pseudo was capped by the highly successful session on pseudoarchaeology at the Society for American Archaeology in Albuquerque, organized by Sara Head and Stephanie Halmhofer, which I was very…
Earlier this week, The Fonds de Rercherche du Québec, the Province’s main science funding body, released, with not quite enough fanfare, its open access (OA) policy. Like Plan S, the policy is a small step in the right direction, but it could be much better. The Fonds has three branches covering health (FRQS), technology and…
In a 2017 Nature paper, Holen et al. claimed to have found a 130 000 year old archaeological site (CM site) in southern California, where humans had butchered mastodon and left cobble and anvil stone tools. The claim was immediately criticized. The main critique so far has been that the evidence is no more consistent…
Josh Emmitt sparked an interesting conversation on Twitter about the requiredness of physically strenuous fieldwork in archaeology. Are there jobs in archaeology that are “non-fieldwork/non-super physical”, he asks? Some wonder whether people who do no fieldwork are even real archaeologists. The discussion, beyond giving a number of great example of archaeological roles that do not…
Bower et al recently proposed archaeological evidence of a 120ky old human presence at the Moyjil in Australia. The oldest well-established archaeological material in Australia is currently just under 60ky old. As Bowler acknowledges in an interview, “That is a big jump to make”. How far do they get? It has become normal for the…
