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I've started reading John Gerring's excellent second edition of Social Science Methodology: A Unified Framework (2nd edition, 2012, Cambridge University Press ), and it has me thinking about unity and pluralism at various levels: within archaeology; within anthropology; and within the social sciences. I have recently been on a methodology kick. I read Gerring's Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (2006, CUP) a couple of months ago, and loved it. Wow, if you had told me a couple of years ago that I would be reading methodological books by a political scientist (and that I would find them fascinating), I would have said you are nuts. In chapter 1, in a section called "The Problem of Pluralism" Gerring puts his finger on one of the reasons I have been thinking about sampling, causality and measurement recently. His book proposes "a unified framework" for methods in the social sciences, and it is one I find very attractive. Normally when you hear ...

(This is a guest post by Gary Feinman) Published in the journal Science , Medina-Elizalde and Rohling’s (2012) quantitative analysis of Terminal Classic period Maya (AD 800-1000) climatic shifts is a welcome refinement of the extent of a late 1 st millennium episode of climatic change. Yet the authors' speculations regarding the fall of inland Maya settlements (the so-called Maya Collapse) is fraught with failures in logic and limitations in hypothesis evaluation that too often are characteristic of natural scientists delving naively into the causes and complexities of societal change. Even more problematic is the repeated license given by one of the world’s premier science journals to this kind of disciplinary overreach at a time when extremely few articles by archaeologists are offered this broadly visible platform.  Medina-Elizalde and Rohling begin with the premise that drought precipitated the collapse of these inland centers. But, when finding precipitation declines of only ...

 “Softcore solipsism” is the name given by Charles Tilly to the work of social historians who take a low-intensity postmodernist approach to theory and research, a kind of “postmodern light.” Although Tilly criticizes this approach in various works, the most explicit is in a book review essay titled “softcore solipsism” (Tilly 1994); see also Tilly (1998, 2008, 2010). I think this phrase is an apt description of much recent archaeological theory. Solipsism is the philosophical doctrine that the only thing one can be sure exists is one’s own mind. The external world does not exist, or we cannot know that it exists, so only a person’s mind is important. The softcore version admits that the real world exists, but casts doubt on the notion that scholars can generate objective knowledge about that reality (particularly in the past). Everyone has their own views of the ancient past, and who is to decide that one view is better than another? Specifically, the foci of analysis are ideas an...