The two hour opener of Season 11 heavily features the discovery of coins, both Roman and Medieval, on Lot 5, near and around the circular depression. As always, we can ask ourselves how surprising and how significant these finds are, and what they might mean. Do the coins indicate treasure? The coins found on Lot…
There is no new evidence that Gunung Padang is a 24000 year old pyramid
In fall 2022, an episode of Graham Hancock’s Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse heavily featured the impressive archaeological site of Gunung Padang in Indonesia. Gunung Padang is a hilltop site with several terraces and visually striking arrangements of the amazing naturally occurring columnar igneous rock that geology has blessed us with in many places on Earth. …
It looks like the 23ky old human footprints at White Sands are solid
Two years ago, Bennet et al. (2021) made a lot of headlines with a claim of (quite amazing) 23 000 year old human footprints on the margin of paleolake Otero, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico. If this was true, it would be the oldest securely dated archaeological site in the Americas by…
Diamond Open Access would cost no more than what we currently spend on academic publishing
Expensive journal subscriptions charged by big commercial publishers, create a significant barrier for access to publicly funded scholarship. Increasingly, these are being replaced by Author Processing Charges (APCs), which create a significant barrier to publishing scholarship, and have cynically been branded as “Gold Open Access” by the same publishers. In my view, this kind of…
Hopewell Airburst Paper Retracted (Why do retractions exist?)
Just this week, the journal Nature Scientific Reports retracted a paper published last year by Tankersley et al. about a hypothesized comet airburst that would have destroyed the Hopewell culture in the Midwestern US about 1500 years ago. This has been a rough few months for airburst and asteroid impact claims in archaeology. Earth-Science Reviews…
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